Development of semantically-enabled community hubs in biorefineries and biorenewables

Abstract The objective of this work is the design of semantically-enabled repository of systems tools for biorefineries and biorenewables. The production of chemicals and fuels based on biomass has been steadily increased, as a consequence of the environmental issues that have arisen by fossil fuels in addition to the steady decrease of their reserves. Aim is the development of competitive industries based on renewable resources. There is a huge potential in capitalizing fragmented work around the world, since this would assist and accelerate the progress in both research and industrial communities. This work aspires to design an environment that would integrate systems tools for biorefineries creating a sharing repository able to process numerical and process information on existing biomass pathways and models. An ontology engineering approach is presented that aims to first prototype the work on small representative cluster of partners (RENESENG project), then to validate the work in wider communities finally testing the work in the world community. The aim is to develop an intelligent environment able to scale-up, also to host and organize resources in the biorefinery community. Using a user-friendly interface, the repository targets groups that include researchers, practitioners, developers, as well as end-users. The paper explains the motivation and the state of play concerning the biorefinery repository and the systems work behind it.