Ontology-based Decentralized Sharing of Industry Data in the European Circular Economy

Circular economy aims at reducing value loss and avoiding waste, by circulating materials or product parts before they become waste. Today, lack of support for sharing data in a secure, quality assured, and automated way is one of the main obstacles that industry actors point to when creating new circular value networks. Together with using different terminologies and not having explicit definitions of the concepts that appear in data, this makes it very difficult to create new ecosystems of actors in Europe today. This project will address the core challenges of making decentralized data and information understandable and usable for humans as well as machines. The project will leverage open standards for semantic data interoperability in establishing a shared vocabulary (ontology network) for data documentation, as well as a decentralized digital platform that enables collaboration in a secure and privacy-preserving manner. The project addresses a number of open research problems, including the development of ontologies that need to model a wide range of different materials and products, not only providing vertical interoperability but also horizontal interoperability, for cross-industry value networks. As well as transdisciplinary research on methods to find, analyse and assess new circular value chain configurations opened up by considering resource, information, value and energy flows as an integral part of the same complex system. Three industry use cases, from radically different industry domains, act as drivers for the research and development activities, as well as test beds and demonstrators for the cross-industry applicability of the results. The developed solutions will allow for automation of planning, management, and execution of circular value networks, at a European scale, and beyond. The project thereby supports acceleration of the digital and green transitions, automating the discovery and formation of new collaborations in the circular economy.