A controlled vocabulary for research and innovation in the field of Circular Bioeconomy

We live in a world of limited resources. Facing global challenges such as climate change and degradation of natural capital, in addition to the increasing rate of resource consumption, we are compelled to look for new ways of producing and consuming that respect the ecological limits of our planet. A model based on the Circular Bioeconomy (CBE) is key to successfully tackling the complexity of this paradigm shift and addressing these challenges: CBE is a relatively new and fast evolving concept, which is still in the conceptualisation phase. It stems from the concepts of “bioeconomy” and “circular economy”, which have become progressively interlinked in recent years.

Although the wider community of stakeholders has not reached yet a consensus on a single definition for CBE, we try to go beyond this limitation, by proposing a controlled vocabulary of keywords related to the field, built by eliciting domain knowledge from both experts and policy-makers. This effort responds to an explorative project launched by the Generalitat de Catalunya (the regional government of Catalonia, Spain - specifically, the Ministry of the Economy and Finance, Secretary for Economic Affairs and European Funds) in order to identify CBE research, development and innovation activities. The work, coordinated by SIRIS Academic, was carried out by consulting the advice of experts in the domain (see Acknowledgements, below), and it was ultimately applied to inform regional strategies on bioeconomy and the Research and Innovation Strategy for Smart Specialisation.

After a qualitative analysis of numerous examples, the keywords extracted have been classified into three categories:

Unequivocal: keywords positively associated with the CBE domain (e.g. bioplastic conversion, biorefinery, or biomass),

Bioeconomy: keywords in the bioeconomy domain but not necessarily within the circular paradigm  (e.g. agriculture, algae, or organic waste),

Technologies and processes: keywords concerning circular processes and technologies (e.g. valorisation, or bioconversion).

This distinction allows one to apply the vocabulary to link a given text to the CBE domain. Indeed, a text may be  considered in the CBE perimeter if it mentions an unequivocal keyword, or if it contains a concept concerning bioeconomy co-appearing with a concept concerning circular technologies and processes (e.g. food waste with composting, or vegetation with biosynthesis).

The circular bioeconomy vocabulary, in its current form, contains 393 keywords (49 unequivocal keywords, 229 bioeconomy keywords, and 115 concerning circular processes and technologies). 

Datasets Provided

In this publication, we provide:

A document outlining the context that lead to the creation of the vocabulary, the methodology used to build it and the strategy to apply it

The full vocabulary of terms as a csv file. For each keyword of the vocabulary, the property “type” specifies whether the term is either an “Unequivocal” CBE keyword, a wider “Bioeconomy” term or a specification of “Technologies and processes”.

In addition to the controlled vocabulary, we also provide a labelled dataset to foster the development of new text mining initiatives on the results obtained. The dataset consists of the description of 2000 R&D projects funded by the Horizon 2020 framework of the European Commission. Of these, 1000 have been associated with the field of CBE via the vocabulary and further manual validation, while further 1000 descriptions are unrelated to CBE. Each project entry has the following attributes: title, abstract, ecRef (project identifier in the EU information service, CORDIS), and label (where True are projects in the CBE domain)

Acknowledgements

The work described above, leading to the production of the datasets provided, was developed in collaboration with Generalitat de Catalunya officials, as well as CBE research and innovation experts and stakeholders that contributed essential input to the conceptual definition of the CBE, the review and improvement of the controlled vocabulary and the quality of the classification, as well as the the revision of the analytical results described in the section Applicability, in particular:

Tatiana Fernández (Direcció General de Promoció Econòmica, Competència i Regulació, de la Generalitat de Catalunya)

Mercè Balcells i Ramón Canela (Universitat de Lleida)

Teresa Botargues (Diputació de Lleida)

Sergio Ponsà (Centre Tecnològic BETA)

Ignacio Rodríguez and Jaume Sió (Departament d’Agricultura, Ramaderia, Pesca i Alimentació, de la Generalitat de Catalunya)