Modeling and Sharing UNSDG Indicator Data for Poverty, Food, Water, and Energy in Relation to Climate Change

We have modeled the targets and indicators of a selected set of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDGs) in relation to the effects of climate change in the Climate-On-WEF ontology. The model logically represents the impacts of climate change (SDG 13) on SDGs 1 (Poverty), 2 (Hunger), 6 (Water), and 7 (Energy). To optimize data interoperability, integration with other ontologies, and efficient representation of the semantics of the complex relations among the SDGs and their targets and indicators, the ontology imports the mid-level Common Core Ontologies (CCO) that directly extend the BFO (Basic Formal Ontology) upper ontology. CCO's underlying 11 ontologies allow efficient formatting of the indicator data type and values to be submitted by individual countries for each target. The ontology allows visualizing the challenges and opportunities of various new technologies in achieving the targets of the SDGs, and ways to improve resilience and adaptive capacity to hazards and natural disasters caused by climate change. Individual countries will be able to submit their annual progress data through the 2030 target year for the indicators related to poverty, food, energy, and water through a planned Web user interface. The front end first instantiates the submitting country as an individual and then populates the ontology with the annual instance data in a related knowledge base. The underlying logics, inherited from the CCO-BFO ontologies, enable efficient querying of each country's submitted annual data through 2030. This allows visualization and analysis of the data and annual progress of individual countries toward achieving the four sustainable goals in the context of climate change, equity, and inclusion as defined by the UNSDGs.