Ontology-Enabled Knowledge Management in Environmental Regulations and Incentive Policies

Abstract

It is critical for global manufacturing enterprises to know and understand regional and local environmental regulations and incentive programs/polices. However, there has been little research aimed at acquiring and disseminating the knowledge of environmental regulations and incentive policies within the business decision making context, especially for the manufacturing industry sector. To address this problem, this chapter presents the Environmental Regulation and Incentive Policies Acquisition and Dissemination (ERIPAD) ontology. This ontology can enable systematic knowledge acquisition and personalized knowledge dissemination via reasoning query languages like SPARQL with its query engine, Apache Jena Fuseki. The ERIPAD ontology is currently customized for the European Union Emission Trading Scheme and the Waxman-Markey bill because of their comprehensiveness and inclusiveness. It is expected that the ERIPAD ontology will enable manufacturing companies to improve agility and efficiency in their energy or environment related decision making process.