Managing LCI Data from Different Workgroups within the same Instance of an LCA Database

Abstract

Life Cycle Thinking (LCT) and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) are the scientific approaches behind modern environmental policies and business decision support related to Sustainable Consumption and Production. For the efficient and reliable application of LCA, it is necessary that LCA studies are based on consistent, transparent, and qualityassured Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) data. To manage and provide such consistent and quality assured Life Cycle data to users the Institute of Applied Computer Science of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology developed an open source service oriented LCA database software (soda4LCA) that can be accessed directly from within LCA tools to store, manage and extract LCA datasets via the Internet. Different soda4LCA instances can even be connected together via the Internet to form a LCA data network which can then be used by users via one of the network nodes. Because of user requirements, the storage model of soda4LCA is enhanced in the current development version to support the management of largely separated collections of datasets (called data stocks) by different working groups. This can be seen as a first step to support multitenancy in soda4LCA. It’s also possible in the current development version to build other logical collections of datasets for such use cases as compiling collections of datasets for review or release management. Data stocks are also the key element of soda4LCA to provide dataset replication via nodes of a soda4LCA data network. Further details of the data stock concept and its usages will be described in the following chapters.