The Sustainability Core Ontology (SCO) is a middle-level ontology, covering the terminology related to the three major theoretical challenges of sustainability:
1) The polysemy of the term sustainability.
2) The relationship between sustainability and sustainable development.
3) The complexity underlying sustainability.
SCO is designed to be the pivotal resource upon which to harmonize and integrate ontologies regarding sustainability. The ultimate goal is to establish a family of interoperable sustainability ontologies. Currently, SCO employs Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) and Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) as the upper-level ontologies. SCO V1.1.0 is the current release and is comprised of two segments: SCO-B (B for BFO) and SCO-U (U for UFO). SCO-B aligns the SCO vocabulary with BFO. SCO-U aligns the SCO vocabulary with gUFO (UFO implementation in the Web Ontology Language (OWL)). SCO V1.1.0. covers three natural languages, English, French, and Italian. SCO V1.1.0. conforms to OBO-Foundry principles.
The most recent version of SCO-B segment can always be found at https://w3id.org/sco. The most recent version of SCO-U segment can always be found at https://w3id.org/sco/sco-u.
