Brought to you by Riccardo Boero from NILU
The CE-RISE Information System is built to support and accelerate the transition to a circular economy by enabling the effective use of emerging digital infrastructures – particularly Digital Product Passports (DPPs) and the new, rich data streams they make available.
How is the CE-RISE Information System different?
At its core, CE-RISE serves as a bridge between diverse data sources, analytical tools, and decision-making applications. What distinguishes it from conventional information systems is its modular architecture, reinforced by an internal ontology that ensures interoperability, data quality, regulatory compliance, and analytical robustness across all components.
Data input
To realise this vision, CE-RISE is designed to integrate data from a wide array of systems, including Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platforms, analytical databases, and decentralised technologies such as blockchain-enabled DPPs. This variety of data inputs introduces challenges in harmonisation and reliability – but also opens new opportunities to build connected, intelligent, and sustainable data ecosystems that power circular economy practices. To address this, CE-RISE employs a common internal data model – an ontology – that acts as a shared language across all modules and external interfaces.
This ontology is not merely a schema; it is a formal representation of knowledge domains relevant to circular economy applications, covering product lifecycles, material flows, compliance parameters, and sustainability metrics.
It is structured in six main sections: product identification, usage and maintenance, compliance, supply chain and reverse logistics, socio-economic and environmental impacts, circularity and resource efficiency. By adhering to this ontology, all components of the CE-RISE ecosystem can exchange information in a semantically consistent way. This is crucial not only for interoperability but also for automating data validation, tracking provenance, and ensuring auditability of results.
Modular design
The modular design of CE-RISE further enhances its flexibility and maintainability. Independent components can be developed, deployed, and evolved separately, as long as they conform to the ontology for data exchange. This allows for a plug-and-play approach, where new analytical tools, visualisation dashboards, or external connectors can be integrated without disrupting the system’s integrity. It also supports a distributed development model, enabling different partners and stakeholders to contribute to the system’s evolution in a coordinated yet autonomous manner.
Uncertainty quantification
One of the unique capabilities enabled by this architecture is uncertainty quantification. Because the ontology captures not only data structures but also semantic constraints and measurement assumptions, the system could trace the origin and reliability of inputs, model their propagation through analyses, and produce uncertainty-aware outputs. This is essential in supporting robust, evidence-based decision-making, especially in contexts involving sustainability, circularity, and regulatory compliance.
Data quality
Data quality is another area supported by the CE-RISE Information System. The ontology enables automatic consistency checks, unit validation, and rule-based enforcement of completeness and integrity conditions. By anchoring data quality mechanisms directly in the model, CE-RISE avoids ad hoc validation code and ensures that quality assurance is embedded across the system lifecycle – from ingestion to storage to analysis.
Compliance
Finally, the CE-RISE Information System provides a solid foundation for compliance. Its architecture ensures traceability, version control, and transparent governance of both data and models, which are essential features in regulatory environments. The ability to seamlessly integrate with DPP solutions and maintain end-to-end traceability across product chains makes it an indispensable tool for organisations aiming to meet current and future regulatory demands.
The CE-RISE Information System and its ontology are under continuous development; its initial data model release is currently being revised, with a new version expected by the end of 2025 that will further specify component definitions and extend integration with industry standards and dictionaries recognized by regulatory bodies and international agencies.