Can we rely on EcoSpold 2 import/export ?

Question

Hi,

You confirmed in another question that the software no longer offers EcoSpold 2 export. I have two questions :

• it seems that you no longer support EcoSpold 2 import either, am I right?
• if we want to use your import/export maven module instead (olca-io), can we rely on it for EcoSpold 2 ?

Thank you in advance,

Clement

Answer 1

Hi Clement,

I am not fully sure I get your point, we do not support ES2 import and export any more because for us the format does not appear to be reliable, no official documentation of the recent version used by the only main user, ecoinvent, and the released ES2 files are not fit for an LCA calculation directly in openLCA. Please therefore rely on the files we release, thank you. And I'd be interested to ask, why do you want to use ES2?

Best wishes,

Andreas

Comments

Hi Andreas,

Thank you very much for the answer. We wanted to use ES2 because it was presented by Ecoinvent as the right format for Ecoinvent 3. However, we tried to import in openLCA an ES1 file based on Ecoinvent 3, and it looks all right.
The thing is that so far, our software generates ES1 files fitted for Simapro. Then the easiest solution for us seems to be adapting our current ES1 generation for an import into openLCA. Are you planning to keep supporting ES1, or would you advise us to migrate to another format you support ? ILCD ? Our processes are  based on Ecoinvent 3.4 and Agribalyse 1.3.

Thank you in advance for any clue !

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Hi Clement,
I see, thank you - ES1 will definitely be further supported in opnLCA, but it is a bit too simple for modern datasets (no parameters, only one unit per flow, etc.). If you want to select a format to work with openLCA, I would recommend openLCA's JSON-LD format, which also is directly useful in linked data systems: http://greendelta.github.io/olca-schema/

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There seems to be some obfuscation of data badly needed to give accurate life cycle assessments by Ecoinvent in not publishing the structure st the Ecospold02 format. Has anyone had any success in understanding the format of Ecospold02?

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Well, as said, the JSON-LD format can be used for "accurate life cycle assesments"; we implemented  the initial final version of ES2 and I think were able to understand it, the revisions are not documented as far as I know.

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At least in my case the more or less convenient way to import and export as well as editing also bigger datasets, is to export them as ILCD zip files and then editing them by using a good xml editor (e.g. Atom https://atom.io/). It takes a while to figure out the structure of ILCD files but after a while it is very efficient working and at least until now it does not produce any issues.