The Aalborg BONSAI contingent and visitors are running a mini-hack-a-thon Jan. 20 & 21 to make progress on finalizing the Exiobase import into the BONSAI ontology. During this time, we have prepared the following:

Trade data and model

Trade data will be imported from the use table. In the initial import, we just take the data as it is - aggregation and cleaning steps will happen afterwards.

Every trade data point will have a unique activity, with the type "Export," and with a single edge to a flow. This is in contrast with so-called normal activities, which can have many input and output edges to flows. As a reminder, activities are resolved in time and space, but flow objects are not, and flows are not explicitly (though you can infer their temporal and spatial context by their linked activity/ies).



Environmental and other extensions

Exiobase has a number of extensions. Some are easy, but others pose modelling or data architecture challenges.

The easy ones: Emissions, resource use, land use, crop residues

Each "thing," such as CO2, is a single new flow object. We store this using the standard flow object / flow / activity approach, and the activity is the activity that produces or consumes the flow.

There is a small exception for emissions, which are also provided in a separate worksheet listing avoided emissions due to the use of manure. This is essentially information used already by the manure treatment activity to calculate its net emissions - a flavor of consequential LCA, if you will. For our purposes, this information is not needing and won't be used.

There is also a question for what Exiobase calls "emissions of activities from unregistered waste." Currently, we plan to skip this, but are investigating whether these values are ever significant (compared to "normal" emissions from the activities).

The hard one: waste / materials

Exiobase has 19 materials (measured in mass), such as wood, textiles, glass, and steel. These can give data on waste production, but also on the material composition of packaging and products. There are multiple worksheets, and they need to be handled separately.

Supply and use of waste

This is the simple case. Each waste material is a flow object (regardless of production or consumption), linked as any other industrial import or export.

Packaging materials

Take the case of production of canned vegetables. Exiobase will give the mass of the produced vegetables, but the mass of the can is given separately in the packaging worksheets, both as a production (linked to the producing activity), and as a consumption (for the consuming activity, such as final demand). When the packaging material is disposed of by the consuming activity, its mass is already included in the total waste figures.

We will give the production or consumption of packaging material as a separate flow & flow object, and provide documentation and examples on how to correctly query for and use the activities that have these linked multiple products.

Supply and use of materials in heterogenous products by activities

In Exiobase, automobile manufacturing is denoted in euros. It is useful to know about the material composition of these cars, however, and Exiobase gives these material compositions (e.g. kg steel per euro) in the above strange title.

This case is tricky, as it is not a case of flow & flow object, but is rather a property of the already existing automobile flow. This is the first time we have to use the ontology section "balancable property" with real data, and it has exposed some elements that we could improve. The relevant people are looking into this.

Supply of materials accumulated at the end of the period, and supply of waste from materials accumulated previously in the society

Exiobase (and, you know, the world) has the concept of stocks: buildings, warehouses, your aunt's toy closet. In a given year, products can enter into stocks, or be removed from stocks. Exiobase gives these stock additions in two perspectives: the product perspective, with normal Exiobase products (in the supply table), and the material composition perspective. The sums of both perspectives should be identical. The above categories list the composition of things either entering the stock pool and staying there are the Exiobase representative year, or things that were added to stock beforehand and turned into waste during the Exiobase representative year.

Next steps

I have written this up to the best of my understanding, but certainly there are some technical errors or places where clarification will be needed. We will be documenting this work, and the BONSAI ontology in general, with easier manuals and examples before the next hackathon.

Dear all-

Bo noticed that the Yale MFA database has finally been publicly
released. This is a very nice opportunity to apply our tools and
ontology, as it will both require us to get a specific implementation
of stocks, and show how what we are doing is relevant to people doing
MFA and Industrial Ecology.

The paper describing the data is here:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-019-0085-7
The data is hosted by USGS here:
https://www.sciencebase.gov/catalog/item/5b9a7c28e4b0d966b485d915
Stefan Pauliuk has already written some parsing/translation code here:
https://github.com/IndEcol/IE_data_commons/commit/1b3948d1fb01b81df8a100a6f02bc90c372352eb

In a similar vein, it would be good to be able to parse the wide
variety of IE data that Stefan and his group have prepared:
http://www.database.industrialecology.uni-freiburg.de/

Before the Spring hackathon, we should have a specific implementation
plan on how to import and use this data. Feel free to reply to this
message if you would be interested.

-Chris

--
############################
Chris Mutel
Technology Assessment Group, LEA
Paul Scherrer Institut
OHSA D22
5232 Villigen PSI
Switzerland
http://chris.mutel.org
Telefon: +41 56 310 5787
############################

Oops, I got that wrong. The meeting is Friday 21st February (!)

Dear all,

As previously announced, on Tuesday January 21st, from 15:00-16:00 CET, TraseEarth will present their project, and I understand that Chris will prepare some slides on BONSAI to present to them as well.

BONSAI is inviting you to join the scheduled Zoom meeting, courtesy of 2.-0 LCA consultants:

Topic: BONSAI meets TraseEarth
Time: Jan 21, 2020 03:00 PM Copenhagen

Join Zoom Meeting
https://zoom.us/j/942489554

Meeting ID: 942 489 554

Best regards

Bo

In spite of the maybe confusing messages from Matteo, the meeting is NOT cancelled. We do look forward to exchange views on Friday.

Best regards

Bo

As previously annouced, on Friday, January 10, from 15:00-16:00

As previously annouced, on Friday, January 10, from 15:00-16:00

Dear all,

As previously annouced, on Friday, January 10, from 15:00-16:00 CET, Joseph Poore will present Hestia, a new initiative to make agriculture and food LCA data more open and comprehensive, initially building on this article: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6392/987.full?ijkey=ffyeW1F0oSl6k&keytype=ref&siteid=sci.

BONSAI is inviting you to join the scheduled Zoom meeting, courtesy of 2.-0 LCA consultants:

Topic: BONSAI meeting Hestia
Time: Jan 10, 2020 03:00 PM Copenhagen

Join Zoom Meeting
https://zoom.us/j/261081130?pwd=aVRsYTJGa2ZOdGt0V0x0cU0vK3lBUT09

Meeting ID: 261 081 130
Password: 990797

Best regards

Bo

Hi all,
combined with the access to the provenance data (which will proceed with new improvements soon),
we are testing also a simplified web interface for the data.

Now if you visit https://odas.aau.dk/
you'll see a 'Comunica' client. Fuseki is still up and running.

The nice thing here is that we will have some pre-configured query that people can run.
Also, probably this will help us to run queries linked to other datasets, like Geonames or Dbpedia (but we will see how far we will manage to go).
This is not a tool we built, but we are just testing out, Emil did the installation.

Feel free to play around.

All the best,
Matteo

Dear all-

After a successful introduction to the work being done by the US EPA,
we will have two more presentations from projects where there could be
exchanges of data and ideas.

On January 10, 2020, from 15:00-16:00 CET, Joseph Poore will present
Hestia, a new initiative to make agriculture and food LCA data more
open and comprehensive, initially building on this article:
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6392/987.full?ijkey=ffyeW1F0oSl6k&keytype=ref&siteid=sci.

On Feb. 21, 2020, from 15:00-16:00 CET, the TRASE
(https://trase.earth) team will present their project. They are also
interested in hearing about BONSAI, so we will need to prepare some
materials ahead of this call.

Both presentations will be from people who have thought deeply about
managing and sharing large open datasets, and we should show them
respect by attending en masse and on time :)

Bo, could you or someone else with the necessary permissions send our
Zoom links for both events?

Yours,
Chris

--
############################
Chris Mutel
Technology Assessment Group, LEA
Paul Scherrer Institut
OHSA D22
5232 Villigen PSI
Switzerland
http://chris.mutel.org
Telefon: +41 56 310 5787
############################

Thumbs up! My full support. When we have multiple channels of cooperation/communication, it is so important that we use them for clearly distinct purposes and cross-link whenever relevant. Agneta's proposal point us in this direction.

Best regards

Bo

Dear all

There have been several concerns about multiple communication channels in BONSAI which make it challenging to follow on what's going on and how to contribute.

To resolve this issue, I suggest some ground rules:

BONSAI github -

•  All issues must be raised and discussed on our Github platform. Issues raised, opened or closed (as well as pull requests) will be automatically updated on the bonsai project board
• This will help everyone to visualize the progress in the overall project. I have already linked the main repositories to the project board.
• If there are issues that you would like to highlight in the community, you can of course write an email to the community with a link to the issue. So people address it directly on github.

Groups.io -

• To announce, webinars, hackathons, workshops
• Meeting minutes
• Introduce new members
• Direct members towards specific issues which require discussion (important: only share the GitHub link for the specific issue)

Slack-

• To be actively used only during Hackathons for informal quick communication
  

Bonsai Wiki

• Bonsai wiki documents the overall vision of the project. I will link Wiki sections to specific repositories where we have addressed the work suggested in the Wiki.

I hope this will help BONSAI members to navigate through the ongoing work on the BONSAI platform

Best wishes
Agneta

Dear all-

I have reached out to the TRASE project (https://trase.earth/), and
they would be interested in presenting their project to us and getting
some idea of how we could work together. They have quite a lot (both
data and workflows) that we could build on, and I think we can offer a
lot ourselves. A good date for them would be Feb. 21, from 15:00 -
16:30 CET (probably wouldn't take that long, but better to reserve the
time just in case).

Please fill in the following Doodle if you could attend **by
Wednesday, Dec. 11**. Thanks!

https://doodle.com/poll/bbh9ui2cnp6d3b4m

-Chris

--
############################
Chris Mutel
Technology Assessment Group, LEA
Paul Scherrer Institut
OHSA D22
5232 Villigen PSI
Switzerland
http://chris.mutel.org
Telefon: +41 56 310 5787
############################