CEON: Circular Economy Ontology Network

Researchers have developed CEON (Circular Economy Ontology Network), a semantic framework designed to improve information sharing across industries to promote circular economy practices. The ontology addresses the challenge of enabling cross-sector communication along product life cycles in construction, electronics, and textiles, facilitating resource reuse and recycling strategies.

The circular economy represents a fundamental shift away from linear consumption models, requiring unprecedented coordination across fragmented industry sectors. CEON emerges as a technical infrastructure solution to a coordination problem that has hindered circular economy adoption. By establishing semantic standards and shared knowledge representation, the ontology network enables machines and systems to understand and communicate data consistently across construction, electronics, and textile industries—sectors that rarely interact despite sharing product lifecycle concerns.

The development of domain-specific ontologies reflects broader recognition that circular economy implementation demands more than policy or incentives; it requires technical standards for data interoperability. Previous attempts to promote circularity often failed because different industries used incompatible data formats and terminology, creating information silos that prevented efficient product recovery and material reuse. CEON directly addresses this bottleneck by defining cross-sectorial concepts that allow stakeholders to document and share information about product composition, disassembly requirements, and material flows.

For industries transitioning toward circular models, CEON provides critical infrastructure that reduces transaction costs and coordination overhead. Companies can now document products semantically, enabling automated systems to identify reuse, refurbishment, or recycling opportunities across supply chains. This has tangible economic implications—efficient material recovery and component reuse directly improve margins and reduce raw material procurement costs.

The framework's testing across three distinct sectors demonstrates scalability and pragmatic applicability. As regulatory pressure for circular economy compliance intensifies globally, adoption of standardized ontologies like CEON will likely accelerate, potentially becoming foundational infrastructure for future circular supply chains. Success here depends on industry adoption and integration with existing enterprise systems.

• →CEON enables semantic interoperability across construction, electronics, and textile sectors to support circular economy strategies.
• →The ontology network addresses critical information-sharing gaps that have historically prevented efficient product reuse and recycling.
• →Standardized semantic frameworks reduce coordination costs and enable automated systems to identify material recovery opportunities.
• →Cross-industry adoption of consistent data standards may become essential as circular economy regulations tighten globally.
• →Technical infrastructure investment in ontologies represents an underappreciated enabler of circular economy transition.