Ontology-Enhanced Life Cycle Assessment: A Case Study of Application in Oil Refinery

This paper presents an improvement of a previous work on an ontology for life cycle assessment or O-LCA by taking into consideration the life cycle inventory (LCI) and life cycle impact assessment (LCIA). The knowledge about environment, manufacturing processes, participating substances, as well as that about assessment methods, are represented in the web ontology language. To demonstrate the benefits of employing a logical formalism and inference in life cycle assessment, we implement a resource recommender system built on top of our developed ontology, and carry out a usability study of the system. With respect to a case study of oil refinery, the evaluation suggests that though there are still a number of requirements from the field users, the system was proven useful in term of user satisfaction.