Indicator & Sustainability Systems

Community indicators are measurements that provide information about past and current trends to assist community planners to make decisions about future outcomes; sustainability indicators measure the sustainability of environmental, social and economic domains. These indicators may be derived from standard public sources or are based on benchmarks, audits, indexes, assessments, or appraisals. Because of its strong integration capabilities, the Open Semantic Framework is well suited to these applications.

With its advanced capabilities to integrate unstructured to structured information, and because it offers flexible means to report and visualize various information types, OSF is a mature environment for indicator systems.

For example, the Peg community indicator system is fully based on OSF. Peg's indicators are grouped into eight theme areas (basic needs, health, education & learning, social vitality, governance, built environment, economy, and natural environment). Peg information is displayed via a library of widgets, including mapping and charting, that are part of the OSF stack. Also, Peg shows how the OSF APIs may be used by third parties to add analysis and visualization capabilities.