This repo is for the planning and execution of the BONSAI Hackathon in Barcelona from March 25-29, 2019. We are also using a mailing list for organization and team communication - you are welcome to join, or browse without subscribing!
This repository, as well as the broader BONSAI effort, is happy to have your contribution! You are welcome to add your thoughts to existing documents, or create new ones. If you are already a hackathon participant, you can make changes directly to the master branch; otherwise, please fork the repo and create a pull request.
Please note that participation in and contribution to the BONSAI hackathon is subject to the code of conduct.
Sustainability assessment, and life cycle assessment (LCA) in particular, is to a large extent built on cathedrals - large background databases, erected by the efforts of many people over a long period of time, but which are now both expensive and exclusive, and whose gatekeepers limit access to both the data and decisions on its management. BONSAI believes in another model, a bazaar where the entire community can contribute to data generation, validation, and management decisions. We strongly feel that an open database is more transparent and more reproducible, and therefore the only option for the science of life cycle assessment. Such databases are also a prerequisite for LCA studies being used to support democratic decision making.
The BONSAI hackathon will be a first step in turning the ideals and standards developed by the efforts of the BONSAI team over the last five years into an open source toolchain capable of supporting LCA calculations.
- RDF approaches to knowledge management have numerous benefits (such as allowing to link different data sources consistently) and wide application but it's unclear how these can be integrated with 'classic' LCA databases.
- More background on the relationships and open issues with LCA and open data here and here.
In addition to the following, we intend to submit 1-2 scientific publications on the hackathon results after its conclusion.
This is being developed in the bentso repository.
Stretch goal 2: A set of global and regional independent validation data, and webpage tracking our values with these validation targets
Stretch goal 3: A simple web-based tool to easily match CSV/Excel tables to the developed ontology using a ML text classifier
Stretch goal 4: A simple web-based tool to compare directly competing statements present in the database
For example, if we have incorporate muliple EEMRIO databases at some point - or if we import new data that is more recent/disaggregated/otherwise different than existing data.