Focuses on specifications of terms and their interrelations in the domain of the 2030 Agenda.
The Inter-Agency Expert Group on Sustainable Development Goals (IAEG-SDG) in its 2nd meeting (Bangkok, October 2015) requested UNEP to develop the SDG Interface Ontology (SDGIO). The SDGIO focuses on specifications of terms and their interrelations in the domain of the sustainable development goals, targets, and indicators. This includes terms such as ‘access’, which occurs 31 times in the SDG Global Indicator Framework. The SDGIO will represent the various meanings and usages of this and similar terms, either by creating new content or coordinating content from existing ontologies.
UNEP has led a working group tasked with the development of an “SDG Interface Ontology” (SDGIO), focused on specifications of terms and their interrelations in the domain of the 2030 Agenda. The SDGIO aims to represent the various meanings and usages of these terms, either by creating new content or coordinating content from other existing and widely used ontologies. Currently, the SDGIO includes more than 100 terms with draft definitions and relations, as well as links to various external ontologies.
For example, the Sustainable Development Goals Interface Ontology (SDGIO) is being used by UNESCO/IOC-IODE in its Ocean Best Practices repository to help align emerging and established methodologies to the framework of the upcoming Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development. This will be instrumental in connecting methods and, in the near future, data from operational and research communities to the monitoring of SDGs 13 and 14. Through the SDGIO - and the federation of domain ontologies it is coordinated with - the development of monitoring tools leveraging multi-stakeholder knowledge can be greatly accelerated.
The SDG Interface ontology is part of a broader SDGs related ontologies that aim to provide a flexible interface for querying linkages across independent information systems, and allow better visibility of SDGs data and metadata and extend the system capabilities by linking to other ontologies with broader scope (environment ontology ENVO). Mapping SDGIO terms to each other will allow to find data and metadata on the semantic web and the entities that play a part in the implementation and monitoring of the SDGs.
E.g. mapping SDGIO_00020000 to C010101 of the SDG data ontology.
