RePlanIT Ontology for Digital Product Passports of ICT

Abstract

The increasing digitisation that we have witnessed in the past few years has resulted in increased information and communications technology (ICT) hardware manufacturing, which is not sustainable due to the growing demand for critical materials and the greenhouse emissions associated with it. A solution is transitioning to a circular economy (CE). To facilitate this, boost the data economy and digital innovation, the European Union has introduced digital product passports (DPPs), which should provide information about a product’s lifetime to bring more transparency into supply chains. However, several challenges, namely the lack of findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable ICT and materials data and tools to support its interpretation for decision-making, are present. Utilising ontologies and knowledge graphs is a possible solution. Although the ontology work in the ICT and materials domains has been on the rise, there is a lack of a unified semantic model that can capture the complex, heterogeneous cross-domain data needed for building DPPs of ICT devices such as laptops and data servers. Motivated by this, we present the RePlanIT ontology for ICT DPPs, which captures knowledge on several levels – ICT device, hardware components, materials and the CE itself. RePlanIT’s specification is based on a literature survey, interviews and inputs from domain experts from both industry and academia. The ontology, its utilisation for building a knowledge graph of DPPs of laptops and data servers and its application have been successfully validated in a real-world case focusing on supporting more sustainable ICT procurement in government.