ARIES releases a strategy to scale up knowledge sharing for better-informed policymaking

As part of the Basque Centre for Climate Change (BC3), ARIES, in collaboration with the United Nations publishes an interoperability strategy for the next generation of SEEA accounting. The document paves the way toward implementing and scaling up the semantic web vision while taking open science to the next level.

SEEA, which stands for the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting, is a set of international environmental-economic standards, adopted by the UN Statistical Commission in 2012, that requires the integration of streams of substantial and diverse data. These include geospatial and other data sources, which have proven challenging for some National Statistical Offices (NSOs) to implement. Although a variety of ecosystem service modelling platforms have been built over the last 15 years to meet various user demands, their development has been uncoordinated. These platforms often duplicate efforts, rely on data that are siloed, and rarely effectively reuse the knowledge gained from past modelling efforts.

By making the data and models that underlie SEEA interoperable (able to work together with minimal effort), NSOs and the scientific community can advance sustainability science and practice by making it possible to rapidly integrate and share new scientific data and models. Doing so requires an understanding of the benefits of interoperability, the costs of the status quo, and concrete pathways toward community-endorsed approaches for interoperability. The ARIES Network, which powers the ARIES for SEEA Explorer, offers such a path toward interoperability and the benefits it offers to NSOs and scientific and policy communities.

Find out more about the technical details of how to use and contribute to the ARIES Network in the following document, which complements a full technical description of the ARIES approach.

We are seeking partner organizations ready to participate as nodes in a semantic knowledge network aiming to use interoperable and reusable science to inform critical national and global sustainability initiatives. Please contact us to learn more and to join us in this journey!