The Prosumer Paradigm for Life Cycle Assessment Services

Abstract

Enterprises, governments, and government agencies have started to publish their data on the Internet, especially in the form of open structured data sources. The real exploitation of these free, large open data sources is more and more becoming a crucial activity for obtaining information and knowledge (i.e. competitive elements) in several business sectors. In addition, with the proliferation of Web 2.0 techniques and applications such as blogs, wikis, tagging systems, and mashups, the notion of user-centricity has gained a significant momentum to put ordinary users in the leading role of delivering exciting and personalized content and services. The term “prosumer,” coined by the futurist Alvin Toffler in 1980, has been often referenced in business-related contexts to identify this situation. The chapter describes the application of the “prosumer paradigm” to a real data integration system of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). ENEA, the Italian National Agency for new Technologies, Energy, and Sustainable Economic Development, promoted the adoption of such practice in small companies belonging to the industrial and agricultural sector supplying them with a simplified LCA system. In this chapter, the authors show how a domain expert user (the prosumer) can use the framework to easily map the classification of data flows and processes provided by the simplified LCA system into the ELCD database, containing a standard classification provided by the EU. This makes the proposal completely shareable with the whole thematic classification and vision promoted by the European Commission.