RCIS 2022 paper: ontologies for sustainability

Conceptual Integration for Social-Ecological Systems

An ontological approach

coral dry tortugas

The paper “Conceptual Integration for Social-Ecological Systems: An Ontological Approach”, which demonstrates an application of ontological analysis in the sustainability context, has been accepted and presented at the 16th International Conference on Research Challenges in Information Science (RCIS 2022).

The paper proposes an ontological clarification and a conceptual integration of two social-ecological systems framework elements, social-ecological system framework [3] and ecosystem services [1, 5]. Many are the discussed elements, ranging from governance, ecosystem services, values and benefit, and several are the referenced ontologies and ontological studies that we adopted for the clarification, e.g. Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering (DOLCE) [2] and Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) [5].

With this paper we hope to foster a discussion across communities (e.g. ecology, economics, applied ontologies, conceptual modelling and information systems). Many are the possible future works, so we are open to receive feedback!

References:

[1] Assessment, M. E. (2005). Ecosystems and human well-being.

[2] Masolo, C., Borgo, S., Gangemi, A., Guarino, N., Oltramari, A.: WonderWeb de- liverable D18 ontology library (final). Tech. rep., IST Project 2001-33052 Wonder- Web: Ontology Infrastructure for the Semantic Web (2003)

[3] McGinnis, M. D., & Ostrom, E. (2014). Social-ecological system framework: initial changes and continuing challenges. Ecology and society19(2).

[4] Guizzardi, G., Botti Benevides, A., Fonseca, C.M., Porello, D., Almeida, J.P.A., Prince Sales, T.: Ufo: Unified foundational ontology. Applied Ontology 17, 1–44 (2021)

[5] Potschin, M., & Haines-Young, R. (2016). Defining and measuring ecosystem services. Routledge handbook of ecosystem services, 25-44.