(290g) Development of a Semantically-Enabled Model-Sharing Biorefinery Platform

The production of chemicals and fuels based on biomass has been steadily increased, as a consequence of the environmental issues that have arisen by fossil fuels in addition to the steady decrease of their reserves. There is a huge potential in capitalizing fragmented work around the world on biorefineries and biorenewables, since this would assist and accelerate the progress in both research and industrial communities. The objective of this work is to integrate biomass pathways, models and tools for biorefineries and create a repository that contains information on these existing biomass pathways and models. The extremely large number of possible pathways as well as the diversity of data consist important challenges that need to be overcome.

An ontology engineering approach will be presented that emulates the types of data as they are available in selected projects, mainly RENESENG¹ but also others. The aim is to develop an intelligent environment able to scale-up to also include and organize resources outside the current project. Ontology engineering has recently attracted a lot of attention in chemical engineering community for managing, searching and enriching knowledge^2,3. Advantages of ontology engineering include the classification of large amount of information, the classification of complex relations, as well as the generation of new information by the use of reasoners. The services of the repository will include (a) access to all data included in the tool, (b) support for high-throughput search and analysis (c) integration with physical property models and data models, (d) synthesis technologies, and (e) uploading of new data of a variety of scales and types from the user. Having a user-friendly interface, the repository targets users of a wide range; from students to engineers in SMEs or international companies. The state of progress of the development of the repository will be presented and example operations will be demonstrated.

References

1. www.reneseng.com
2. Weisner et al., Computers and Chemical Engineering 35 (2011) 692-708
3. Trokanas, et al., Computers and Chemical Engineering 66 (2014) 259 - 268