Concept and Implementation of a Service API for the Remote Access to Life Cycle Assessment Databases

Abstract

For implementation of political concepts like the Integrated Product Policy (IPP) of the European Union, which aims at a “sustainable society”, it is inevitable to widely apply in industry methods of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), which analyze the whole life cycle of products with respect to sustainability topics like resource usage and other environmental impacts. For the efficient and reliable application of LCA, it is necessary that LCA studies are based on consistent, transparent, and quality-assured background data. But LCA modellers often face the problem of needing datasets from different LCA databases or data sources for a study. And these datasets typically have different formats and cannot be easily used together because their nomenclature and references to common elements are not harmonized. This results in tedious manual work which has to be performed by the modellers to merge such datasets into an already existing internal database within their LCA tool. The open source project SODA4LCA led by the Institute of Applied Computer Science at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in cooperation with other partners tries to solve such problems of dataset providers and modellers through concepts and corresponding implementations for building up service-oriented infrastructures for LCA on the Internet. The SODA4LCA LCA database application as one of the main outcomes of the project implements a service-oriented API which allows it to build up networks of LCA database nodes maintained by different data providers. Tools used by modellers can connect to these data networks and query, retrieve and even upload data in an easy and consistent way. The SODA4LCA service API and its applicability will be described in more detail in this paper.