Dear colleagues from industrial ecology and beyond,
The lack of data sharing and the required infrastructure in environmental systems analysis are a major barrier to cumulative research. To move forward, I worked on a general data model for socioeconomic metabolism and its implementation in a relational database. The result of this work, to which Niko Heeren, Daniel Müller, and the Freiburg programming student Mahadi Hasan contributed substantially, is now online.
The database we developed works at a medium level of data integration, meaning that it requieres data providers to structure the data and record their semantics, but is flexible regarding which classifications are used for objects, processes, regions, etc.
For the first time (?), a large variety of different industrial ecology and socioeconomic data, including unit process inventories, IO tables and vectors, stocks, flows, material compositions, population and GDP etc. pp. can be formatted in a common data model and exchanged via a common database. A publication on the data model and its implementation has been submitted to JIE already.
I invite you to try out
http://www.database.industrialecology.uni-freiburg.de/
and check some of the 100+ datasets that are available for download and browse through the documentation provided.
I am looking forward to receiving your feedback and your ideas regarding how we can develop data sharing further!
Best regards,
Stefan Pauliuk
University of Freiburg
Germany
