Page 156 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

SOURCING LIFE CYCLE INVENTORY DATA 139

The Internet has made public data more easily accessible than ever before.
"Right-to-Know" legislation is putting more and more industry information
into the public domain. However, public databases are not currently geared
toward providing information for LCA studies. For example, data are often
aggregated in ways that are difficult to sort out. Key pieces of data, such as
production values, are sometimes missing or not available for the same aggre-
gate grouping for which other data are available. Some information needed
for LCA studies, such as raw material quantities for different processes, is not
contained in public databases. As these problems are overcome, it may be pos-
sible to have readily available, easily interpreted data for LCA studies. A real
value of giving everyone easy access to the same LCA data is that studies by
different LCA practitioners could be more easily duplicated and verified. A lot
of money and resources have been spent on studies of the same issues funded
by different interest groups.
Current trends in information technology and knowledge management tech-
nologies, combined with significant societal trends in the way that knowledge
is created and managed, will very likely shape users' expectations regarding
data availability, software functionality, and interoperability, altering the scope
of what can be done with LCI data in very basic ways. Data providers will be
expected to create LCA knowledge management frameworks in which data
are more distributed, more mobile, more democratic, and less standardized,
yet providers will be expected to make sure that data continue to be interoper-
able between applications and platforms.

5.10.3 Crowdsourcing

The practice of crowdsourcing utilizes the talents of large groups in a distrib-
uted and usually minimally directed way to accomplish tasks. By tapping into
the collective intelligence of the public at large to complete business-related
tasks that a company would normally either perform itself or outsource to a
third-party provider, more can be accomplished with fewer resources (think
Wikipedia). When applied to LCI along with evolving Web 2.0 technology,
large numbers of the basic unit process data can be efficiently and effectively
collected by producers and shared widely. Because there is less direct con-
trol, this will require additional activities to ensure a reliable and consistent
outcome:

• Review of data to ensure quality and accuracy, and
• Aggregation of data across producers of the same or similar
products to form horizontally aggregated, or "generic," datasets,
thereby protecting business sensitive information.

Crowdsourcing can lead to a competitive marketplace to provide the neces-
sary review and aggregation services. Once review and aggregation are com-
pleted, managers of existing databases could decide to integrate the newly
available generic data into their databases; indeed, the database managers