A knowledge base with modularized ontologies for eco-labeling: Application for laundry detergents

Along with the rising concern of environmental performance, eco-labeling is becoming more and more popular. However, the complex process of eco-labeling is demotivating manufacturers and service providers to be certificated. The knowledge contained in eco-labeling criteria documents is not semantically exploitable to computers. Traditional knowledge base in relational data model is not inter-operable, lacks inference support and is difficult to be reused. In our research, we propose a comprehensive knowledge base composed of interconnected OWL (Ontology Web Language) ontologies. This ontology based knowledge base allows reasoning and semantic query. In this paper, a modularization scheme about ontology development is introduced and it has been applied to EU Eco-label (European Union Eco-label) laundry detergent product criteria. This scheme separates entity knowledge and rule knowledge so that the ontology modules can be reused easily in other domains. Reasoning and inference based on SWRL (Semantic Web Rule Language) rules in favor of eco-labeling process is also presented.