cost subclasses have to be rescructured according to #1875

[stap-m]

Description of the issue

We decided to make cost a process attribute, see oeo-dev 86 and #1902
Cost is a process attribute that describes the amount of money needed to buy, make, or do a thing.

Now we have to restructure its subclasses:

• which are process attributes?
• what are the corresponding quantity values?
• check existing axioms!

Ideas of solution

If you already have ideas for the solution describe them here

Workflow checklist

• I discussed the issue with someone else than me before working on a solution
• I already read the latest version of the workflow for this repository
• The goal of this ontology is clear to me

I am aware that

• every entry in the ontology should have a definition
• classes should arise from concepts rather than from words

[madbkr]

I took a look at these classes. If I am not doing this wrong - which is possible - then none of them have unique axioms associated with them except social cost (and one of those is marked as obsolete).

From the reading I did I feel like those would be process attributes:
delivery cost
investment cost (and all it's subclasses)
variable cost (and all it's subclasses)
levelised cost of electricity

While these classes don't seem to fit process attribute for me:
fixed cost because by definition those should apply to several processes and therefore not existentially depend on it.
social cost of emission because this is linked to the emission value rather than a specific process.

[stap-m]

From the reading I did I feel like those would be process attributes:
delivery cost
investment cost (and all it's subclasses)
variable cost (and all it's subclasses)
levelised cost of electricity

I agree. Maybe we can find some meaningful axioms anyway.

While these classes don't seem to fit process attribute for me:
fixed cost because by definition those should apply to several processes and therefore not existentially depend on it.
social cost of emission because this is linked to the emission value rather than a specific process.

fixed cost: There are no fixed costs without an operation or maintencance process. Therefore, I see an existential dependency of processes here, too.

social cost of emission: this looks like an inconsitency in the def and axioms. I'll take a closer look.

[areleu]

Looking at: #958 I understand that the reason social cost of emission is there is because of carbon certificates. And to my understanding in this context the value is attached to the act of emitting and not to the emission itself, thus is not tighly coupled to the emission quantity.

This is important because often in this context we speak of things like CO2 equivalents and the actual emission may have happened already in the past or it may happen in the future so I would be careful of attaching the social cost of emission to an specific process and I would rather handle it in an agent/social part of the ontology.

So my suggestion is to completely remove the axiom relating the social cost of emission from the actual emission, so neither emission rate nor emission value should be related to it. And if they are to be related to each other is through parallel processes, namely the physical act of emitting (within a time frame, i.e. a year) and the accounting of emissions during an operational time frame (also a year, for example), both of which can be parts of a wider process (i.e. the operation of a cement plant). And I think this is not so crazy, as you often see that the companies separate between operations and accounting.

Even if you look into wikipedia they classify the social cost of carbon as a marginal cost https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cost_of_carbon , without going to deeply into the validity of this claim, it seems reasonable.