A proposal for a LCA community knowledge management system

Abstract

Practitioners conducting life cycle assessments are uniquely dependent on data collected or published by their colleagues. To meet the LCA community’s strong need for transparent, quality, regionally-relevant data, this paper proposes the development of an online LCA-community knowledge management system (KMS). An online LCA-community KMS could provide the means for the global LCA community to collaboratively create, store, review and compare LCI data. In conjunction with the LCI data store the KMS could provide for an online publication knowledgebase with the ability for authors to provide further clarification of the data collection and analysis methods used in their publications. Finally, an LCA-community KMS could adapt features of various social software applications to provide even more avenues for members to collaborate, to share and to learn from one another.