Creating LCA Data Exchange Networks

In the Integrated Product Policy Communication of 2003, the European Commission recognised Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) as “the best framework for assessing the potential environmental impacts of products”. It also identified “the need to improve data availability and quality worldwide by internationally cooperating on LCA data and methods”. To address this situation and to foster standardization, the ILCD (International Life Cycle Data) format was developed by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (DG JRC) and implemented by the Institute of Applied Computer Science (IAI) of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). IAI also implemented an LCA database application for storing ILCD datasets by the name of soda4LCA (service oriented database application for LCA), which was published under an Open Source license. Subsequently, the idea of establishing a global, decentralized data network for high quality LCA datasets based on the ILCD format called the ILCD Data Network has been proposed and first data network features were implemented in soda4LCA. This paper summarizes requirements for implementing LCA data networks and presents the already implemented network features as well as an outlook to future enhancements of soda4LCA. It also presentshow these features are instrumented by the ILCD Data Network.