DBFZ Ontologies

European Waste Catalogue Ontology (ewc-onto)

The ewc-onto is the translation of the European Waste Catalogue (EWC) into an ontology. The hierarchy and the names of the classes were completely preserved from the EWC, which means the ontology includes the 20 top-level categories (waste classes), subordinated the waste groups per waste class, and as lower level the residues per waste group. This structure results in 990 classes in the ontology. These classes are named by their waste code from the EWC, which is two numbers per layer, and by their human understandable description from EWC. Additionally, the waste code can be given as a data property.

The information about the hazardousness, which is also included in the EWC, is implemented as an additional class in the ontology with two subclasses (hazardous and non-hazardous). The third layer of the waste tree (residues) is connected to the second layer of the hazardousness tree via an object property.

In version 1.0 English and German language are available. Additionally, four examplary instrances are included in the ontology. In the next version we plan to include more biogenic residues as exemplary instances.

In version 2.0 more lanuages are added. Furthermore, this version contains instances from DBFZ Resource Database.

Circular Utilization Pathways for Biogenic Residues Ontology (CircUPath BRO):

Further features and information will be added.

Publications

An ontology to identify biogenic wastes and residues from bioeconomy, published June 11 2025, publication language German
An Ontology Classifying Residues from the Bioeconomy, published May 24 2025, publication language English

References

European Waste Catalogue (2014/955/EU: Commission Decision of 18 December 2014 amending Decision 2000/532/EC on the list of waste pursuant to Directive 2008/98/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council Text with EEA relevance) from December 30 2014
Abfallverzeichnis-Verordnung (Verordnung über das Europäische Abfallverzeichnis (Abfallverzeichnis-Verordnung - AVV)) from 30 June 2020

European Waste Catalogue Ontology (ewc-onto) - Version 1.0

Ontology: https://w3id.org/ewc-onto/

Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15348556

GitHub: https://github.com/kschmidt-at-dbfz/ewc-onto

License: CC BY 4.0

Release: September 2025

European Waste Catalogue Ontology (ewc-onto) - Version 2.0

Release: soon

Circular Utilization Pathways for Biogenic Residues Ontology (CircUPath BRO) - Version 1.0

Release: soon

Further information:

The ontology was developed with Protégé and can be openend and transformed into other data types (owl, rdf) there without any problems.

Fig. 1. A view on the waste class 02 (wastes from agriculture, ...) and its subclasses as an example for the structure of the ontology. As names of the classes only their waste codes are given. Icon indicate the meaning of the class, whereby the same icons have the same meaning.

Fig. 2. Some exemplary classes (gray boxes with yellow circles) and instances (gray boxes with purple diamond) of ewc-onto and their connections (blue line - has subclass; purple line - has instance; gray dotted line - has some hazardousness of; green dashed - has hazardousness; yellow dashed line - is hazardousness of; orange dashed line - has hazardousness). These triples (class - connection - class) can be transformed into sentences (object - verb - object) as Hazardousness has subclass Non-Hazardous to capture their meaning. This figure was made with OntoGraf in Protégé.