Knowledge based approach to sustainability assessment

The world is currently trying to implement activities that will contribute to achieving sustainable development. Therefore, questions arise about how to comprehensively assess the impact of undertaken actions on sustainable development, their effective measurement and extraction of relevant information that will help in making even better decisions on sustainable development. Due to the fact that many efforts have been made to promote, implement and maintain an appropriate level of sustainable development, the very process of assessing sustainable development is now becoming increasingly important. However, the problem arises which type of assessment tool may be more beneficial to measure selected aspects of sustainable development and where to find the necessary knowledge about it. This paper proposes an extendable knowledge model to assess sustainability more comprehensively and to capture interrelationships across the multiple measures, frameworks, indicators and other approaches to measure sustainability. The need for extension of SA is resulted for two reasons, the obvious need to update the methodological approaches contained in the knowledge base and the need to increase the practical possibilities of the model by including relevant datasets.