A Semantic Information Services Framework for Sustainable WEEE Management Toward Cloud-Based Remanufacturing

Sustainable management of waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) has attracted escalating concerns of researchers and industries. Closer information linking among the participants in the products's lifecycle should take place. How to interoperate among the distributed and heterogeneous information systems of various participants is a challenge faced. Targeting the cloud-based remanufacturing, this article aims to develop a semantic information services framework for sustainable WEEE management. In the proposed framework, an ontology based approach is developed to integrate and represent the lifecycle information from multiple local data sources within an information services provider. Meanwhile, a semantic information services management platform is introduced for the advertisement, matchmaking and retrieval of semantic information services. Some relevant techniques used to build the framework are introduced extensively. A demonstration case study on waste LCD TV is used to illustrate the effectiveness and significance of the proposed framework.