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The aim of BONSAI is to make reliable, unbiased sustainability information on products – “product footprints” – readily and freely available whenever and wherever it is needed to support product comparisons and decisions.
BONSAI is a not-for-profit association, with the aim that all data, software and algorithms to produce “product footprints” are maintained as open source.
See below a representation of the BONSAI network as a flow diagram organized in working groups. Additional descriptions are provided on each action areas and Working Groups in the following wiki-pages.
Simplified structure of the BONSAI database. See Glossary for definitions
Visit BONSAI website for a more exhaustive description of the BONSAI vision, organisation and strategy.
The BONSAI wiki contains description of work packages and tasks, aiming at developing a clear definition of their:
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Functional specifications: a description of the specific functions that a component must perform. The purposes is to achieve a team consensus on what the program is to achieve before moving to more time-consuming effort of writing source code.
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Technical specifications: a description of the technical requirements to fulfil the function defined by the functional specification, e.g.: software to be used, inputs that can be provided to the software system and how the system responds to those inputs. The purpose is to facilitate the harmonisation of different components and avoid errors due to lack of compatibility and interoperability issues.
The wiki is therefore used to:
- communicate decisions and development issues to the BONSAI developer community;
- keep the community constantly aligned and updated;
- provide descriptions and links to relevant existing software code and data;
- outline the missing parts of the database system, and define and organise tasks and actions to be taken.
Tasks are given a priority Level according to the following scale: Required for Beta Version = High; Required for widespread public use = Intermediate; General nice-to-have = Low.
The following pages are dedicated to the fundamental tasks for the completion of the BONSAI Beta version, a future complete version to be used for testing purposes:
Some of the Core Database Architecture tasks correspond to Working Groups and the respective Work Packages. In this case, the task description is in the Work Package. The Working Groups are distributed over 3 action areas:
Harvest data work packages:
Input Output Framework
Big Data harvesting
Data Provider Interface
Ensure data quality work packages:
Global Impact Assessment
Uncertainty
Validation
Data review
Make data usable work packages:
Product System Algorithms
Data Access
User Communities