CEON: Circular Economy Ontology Network
2026-06-01 • Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence
AI summaryⓘ
The authors created a tool called the Circular Economy Ontology Network (CEON) to help different industries share information about products and materials more easily. This tool focuses on making data understandable across sectors like construction, electronics, and textiles to support recycling, reusing, and refurbishing efforts. Their work aims to improve communication and information sharing to help society use resources more sustainably. They show how CEON works by applying it in real-world examples across multiple industries.
Circular EconomyOntologySemantic InteroperabilityResource CircularityData DocumentationProduct Life CycleRecyclingRefurbishingCross-sector Communication
Authors
Huanyu Li, Els de Vleeschauwer, Robin Keskisärkkä, Mikael Lindecrantz, Mina Abd Nikooie Pour, Ying Li, Ben De Meester, Patrick Lambrix, Eva Blomqvist
Abstract
Increasing the circularity of resource use in our society has been recognized as a path to sustainability, i.e., transitioning into a more circular economy. There are many different circular strategies to do so, such as reusing products and components, refurbishing and remanufacturing used products, or recycling left-over or used materials. To enable these strategies, it is necessary to share information at the infrastructure level and to communicate between industry sectors along the product life cycle. Enabling semantic interoperability in this information sharing and communication is therefore a key to increasing circularity. However, knowledge representation for the circular economy (CE) domain, which involves many relevant industry sectors related to product life cycles, remains challenging. To bridge this gap, we developed the Circular Economy Ontology Network (CEON) within the Onto-DESIDE project. This ontology network aims to fill gaps in CE by defining cross-sectorial concepts and to enable semantics-aware data documentation. We demonstrate CEON through cross-industry data documentation scenarios spanning construction, electronics, and textile sectors.