A Knowledge Organization System for the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals

This paper presents a formal knowledge organization system (KOS) to represent the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The SDGs are a set of objectives adopted by all United Nations member states in 2015 to achieve a better and sustainable future. The developed KOS consists of an ontology that models the core elements of the Global SDG indicator framework, which currently includes 17 Goals, 169 Targets and 231 unique indicators, as well as more than 450 related statistical data series maintained by the global statistical community to monitor progress towards the SDGs, and of a dataset containing these elements. In addition to formalizing and establishing unique identifiers for the components of the SDGs and their indicator framework, the ontology includes mappings of each goal, target, indicator and data series to relevant terms and subjects in the United Nations Bibliographic Information System (UNBIS) and the EuroVoc vocabularies, thus facilitating multilingual semantic search and content linking.