Ontologies for Sustainability: Theoretical Challenges

The lack of sustainable practices in key sectors of human societies is a global concern, held by some to threaten the life of the whole planet. To date, we have found that no studies review ontologies in terms of sustainability. This paper aims to fill such a gap. In Section 1, we outline the three major challenges associated with sustainability: 1) the polysemy of the term; 2) the relationship between sustainability and sustainable development; and 3) the complexity underlying sustainability. In Section 2, we review the main accomplishments achieved so far by ontologies to meet these theoretical challenges. We devote special attention to ontologies belonging to the OBO Foundry due to the pivotal role these play in the field of applied ontology. We provide a List of Sustainability Ontologies documenting the resources we assessed. To conclude, we advance a potential trajectory to further develop an OBO Foundry-compliant family of sustainability ontologies.