OEPI - Solu­tion and Ser­vices En­gin­eer­ing for Meas­ur­ing, Mon­it­or­ing, and Man­age­ment of Or­gan­iz­a­tions' En­vir­on­ment­al Per­form­ance In­dic­at­ors

Mission of OEPI was to provide business users with an inter-organizational platform and tools to provision and share environmental performance indicators across the chain and incorporate them in their business processes.

Therefore, OEPI has developed a flexible web portal prototype that supports three applications: “Design for Environment”, “Sustainable Procurement”, and “Organizational Reporting”. It allows even users with only a limited knowledge of sustainability issues to enter, compute and compare indicators for products and organizations, as well as generating indicators for and requesting information from their business partners. In cases where the data cannot be obtained internally or from suppliers, the portal makes it possible for users to access and import data from high quality environmental databases (e.g. ELCD), product lifecycle assessment tools (e.g. SimaPro) and enterprise sustainability management applications (e.g. SAP SuPM).

Technically, the integration of external data sources in OEPI follows a “semantic approach” that has been designed in the project. The term “semantic” indicates that the representation of environmental indicators is based on the OEPI ontology (RDF/OWL) developed within project runtime and further technologies associated with the “semantic web” are used for the prototype implementation (Jena 2 Framework, Jena TDB as data store, SPARQL for queries, Joseki server for SPARQL endpoints). This approach enables a software-based description and processing of environmental indicators and their meaning (semantics) in different sub domains of the sustainability domain far beyond conversion of different formats. This is essential in the area of environmental data as many of the available data sources differ in the interpretation of their data, requiring the context to be analysed for correct understanding.

C-LAB made an essential contribution to the requirements analysis and the development of the ontology of environmental indicators for OEPI as well as participated in the design and prototyping of the semantic approach for handling external data.

Exploitation possibilities for project results and the corresponding acquired know-how include:

• OEPI portal as a sustainability-related offering for a community of business users,
• OEPI inspired additions to sustainability solutions used by Atos internally or provided to customers of Atos,
• synergies resulting from OEPI contacts to companies offering products or services e.g. for product lifecycle assessments,
• transfer of know-how and concepts in the area of sustainability and related to ontologies and semantic web.

Project funded by: EU (FP7 ICT)
Project duration: 02/2010 - 07/2012

Project partners: