Page 155 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

138 LIFE CYCLE ASSESSMENT HANDBOOK
Data producers
LCA
tools

Subject matter experts
Submit,
edit &QA

Computation,
Life Cycle modeling, analysis
Inventory (LCI)
Administrators & visualization

Data consumers
Figure 5.3 US Department of Agriculture's "LCA Data Commons" Concept and Architecture
(Liu 2011).

Goal 3: Research co-products allocations; and conduct a full-scale life cycle
assessment to test the system and seed the database. A panel of external
experts will be called upon to review the assessment methodology and data
quality.

When fully developed, the data commons system will support a wide range
of LCA analytical models including: consequential and attributional LCA;
input-output analysis; and hybrid LCA. Data stored in the central database
will be publicly accessible. Customers will be able to upload data into their
own tools for analysis; integrating public data with private local data. Once
compiled these same data customers can become providers by uploading their
compiled inventories into the central database.

5.10.2 Open-Source Models

Increasing the public availability of reliable LCI databases is a large
part of the solution to the challenge for conducting LCA studies (other
significant hurdles include increased awareness of the need to apply life
cycle approaches in environmental management and the development of
robust life cycle impact assessment models for missing impact categories,
3
such as land use). Similarly, easing the access by users to reliable data is a
crucial step for more widespread use of LCA. A lot of money and resources
have been spent on studies of the same issues funded by different interest
groups.

3 A database may be openly available to the public yet not easily accessible by end users.