Draft: Terms of Use for Federal LCA Commons Datasets

This is a working document to describe the Terms of Use for Federal LCA Commons datasets. www.lcacommons.gov

Intended Audience

The immediate audience for this document is so called "third party" distributors of LCA "data". These are organizations that produce and distribute (often for a fee) data products in support of (typcically) commercial LCA modeling. The consumers of these products are independent LCA consultants, or LCA practioners embedded in a company, looking for a conceptually consistent, trust worthy, easy-to-use data product to support an LCA program or business. Third party distributors will identify best available datasets from a range of sources including government produced data, and modify them for inclusion in their data package. Attribution to the source of data contributes to consumer confidence. But the modifications may alter the representation of the data in significant ways.

Other potential audience could include:

• academics looking for resources to support research or instruction
• regulatory agencies at federal, state, or local level looking for best available LCI
• independent consultants
• students
• private industry seeking reference or benchmark LCI data
• ???

(note: is there a class of user this isn't pertinant to? Is this just a general Terms of Use?)

Use Cases

LCA^2 data exchange (perhaps all third party vendor?)

Fed Commons LCI are used as components of a Canadian national inventory, prepared by CIRAIG and published by EcoInvent. Questions that arise include:

• How is provenance and versioning to the Fed Commons, and/or the agency owner communicated?
• What kinds of modifications are permissable to Fed Commons data to make them compliant with EcoInvent, while still "being" Fed commons data?
• How can an end user identify, inspect, and interpret the differences between Fed Commons data via EcoInvent and Fed Commons data via lcacommons.gov?
• How can the Commons / end users determine the quanitiative differences between versions of data (if any) and how should they be reconciled?
• Two-way exchange. How can the Fed Commons support North American LCI (particularly LCI of traded goods) on the lcacommons.gov? considering EcoInvent datasets are behind a paywall?

Outline / Areas of Concern

• Attribution of datasets to originating agency
  • proper agency/actor citation
  • dataset/repo versioning communicated
  • limitations to data modification. What changes are permissable while still being attributable to orignal agency?
• Required documentation of changes, i.e., level of transparency
• Known unacceptable uses, description of cases.