Literature Review

General

Journals, science organisations, and funders frequently issue editorials, opinion pieces, and other material highlighting opportunities and challenges related to open science. Here we try to keep track of them:

Nature, March 13 2018: Everyone needs a data-management plan "The laudable move towards open science — under which data are shared — makes the need for good data management more pressing than ever: there’s no point in sharing data if they aren’t clean and annotated enough to be reused. If you haven’t got a plan for your data, you need one now."

Data ontology

Industrial ecology

Toward a Practical Ontology for Socioeconomic Metabolism DOI: 10.1111/jiec.12386. Starting point for the ontology developed here is the observation of the need to describe complex systems in a quantitative manner. The broadest categories of description include: objects, their properties, and events. The ontology uses the quantiative systems approach of material flow anlaysis by Baccini and Bader. It is very simple: The system is divided into processes (where events happen, described as 'black box'). The processes are connected by flows (also a form of an event). The flows are made out of the objects studied. The properties of the objects change during events: Either in the proceses, or in the flows (change in location or ownership). Stocks are sets of objects in a process. Stocks are always associated with one process and measured at one point of time. Flows always link two processes, have a direction (directec link), and are measured over a time interval. The system structure that arises from that basic ontology is that of a directed graph.
A General System Structure and Accounting Framework for Socioeconomic Metabolism DOI: 10.1111/jiec.12306. In this paper we analysed how the different methods MFA, LCA, IO, etc. describe the system structure, either explicitly or implicitly, using the ontology described above. The answer is that there are two types of system structures: The most basic one is a directed graph, where the system is divided into processes that are connected by (directed) flows. MFA systems are the best example of this type. Other approaches, in particular, IO, split the processes into two groups, and flows only go from a process in one group to the other, never within groups. That structure is called a bipartite graph, and the two process groups are commonly termed 'industries' or 'transformation processes' and 'markets' or 'distribution processes'. We continue by showing that 1) supply and use tables are an equivalent description of bipartite directed graphs and 2) a system described as directed graph can be converted to a bipartite directed graph by introducing distribution nodes at appropriate places. We then propose a general system structure of sociometabolic studies as directed bipartite graphs in form of a generalised supply and use table.