DESIGNING FOUNDATIONAL STRATEGIES FOR DEVELOPING A FAMILY OF FOOD SYSTEMS SUSTAINABILITY ONTOLOGIES

During the last two decades, ontologies – theories for representing knowledge – have shown their potential in cohering heterogeneous perspectives and establishing common semantics across varied stakeholders and domains. Despite that, to date, limited and isolated efforts have been made with regard to sustainability – a participatory shared language would highly benefit in clarifying and possibly harmonizing the diverse perspectives, metrics, and approaches that currently exist on sustainability. To deal with those shortcomings, this PhD dissertation provides a toolkit of solid philosophical strategies establishing a suitable foundational basis to support the consistent and interoperable design of ontologies for sustainability. Food systems have served as the core case study of this work, due to being the primary drivers of many of the current global sustainability concerns threatening life on Earth, such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and malnutrition. The proposed toolkit covers three strategies: 1) a review analysis of currently available ontologies regarding sustainability and related theoretical challenges, a roadmap towards a family of interoperable sustainability ontologies, and a Sustainability Core Ontology (SCO), 2) a meta-framework for food systems sustainability, and 3) a methodology for developing food systems sustainability ontologies using the designed meta-framework, and a use-case ontology addressing sustainability in meat systems, named Sustainable Meat Systems Ontology (SuMSO). This PhD dissertation is a collection of three research papers, each dedicated to describing one of these strategies.