The team behind the Anthropogenic Impact Accounting Ontology Suite (AIA) is pleased to announce that our project became an official Lab at LF Decentralized Trust (LFDT) in July 2026. The Lab is named Accountable Impact Commons, which reflects our long-term goals. Our GitHub repositories now live under a GitHub organization of the same name.

About AIA

The Anthropogenic Impact Accounting Ontology Suite provides a comprehensive semantic framework for representing anthropogenic impact accounting data in a machine-readable format. The suite currently consists of four specialised ontologies, each published at a permanent W3ID address:

Why LF Decentralized Trust?

LFDT is the premier open source foundation for decentralized technology. For us the keyword is trust. The provenance of our software matters, and so does the provenance of the data our ontologies describe.

We firmly believe that trust is built on transparency, on shared information, and on the ability to communicate and coordinate action. A data sharing and communication framework grounded in common semantics goes a long way toward enabling all three.

Why a Lab?

The AIA Ontology Suite had its genesis under the aegis of LFDT. It is the product of collaboration by members of the Standards Working Group of the LFDT Climate Action and Accounting SIG.

Evolving from a Working Group into a Lab signals our intent to keep building. We also want to open up the collaboration in a structured way and support a community of participants. That is why we chose the name Accountable Impact Commons: we view these ontology resources as belonging to a global and open community.

Becoming a Lab can also open up funding avenues. Ultimately it is the next step on the road to becoming a formal LF project.

How it works

The AIA Ontology Suite is a tool for aggregating and consolidating impact accounting data across different standards and vocabularies. The ontologies are generic enough for anthropogenic impact accounting in almost any discipline and context, including climate action impact accounting.

With AIA we enable:

  • the exchange of impact data
  • the verification of impact evidence across platforms
  • the semantically explicit linking of claims and evidence
  • the reuse of common classes and properties
  • the mapping of legacy schemas into a common model

The suite’s initial set of ontologies was released on 16 September 2025.

What comes next

The AIA team members who designed the ontologies are domain experts with long experience. Some are available on a consulting basis should you need expert help.

Documentation and user resources for the ontologies are being written, and they will be made available under the Lab. Another effort in progress is the Sema Academy, a learning programme that starts with the basics of the semantic web and progresses to structured ontologies and their application, including AIA. The name comes from sema, Greek for sign.

We will publish a roadmap on this site setting out our intentions in timeline form. Our near-term plans include developing indicator and methodology ontologies. We will also be adopting SSSOM, the Simple Standard for Sharing Ontological Mappings, for AIA and for CIDS.

Try it out

Ontologies develop through consensus, and the AIA Ontology Suite is continually evolving. We invite you to annotate your impact data using AIAO and to share the results with us.

Our GitHub repository provides guides for annotating your data, whether you want to do it manually or with LLM assistance.

Please share your results, questions, comments and suggestions.

Contact

To chat, join the LFDT Discord. There is a channel for the #accountable-impact-commons Lab, which you can activate under Channels and Roles.