FLCAC Metadata Requirements

[dt-woods]

What are they?

[dt-woods]

@bl-young, there's been a discussion on our end whether we need to 'bulk up' the flow metadata in the baseline's JSON-LD. Currently, I'm using fedelemflowlist v.1.2.2 to map elementary flows to get their UUIDs; however, I'm seeing that the CAS number and the FEDEFL version numbers are not carried over. The Commons seems to have version 1.0 available. Any recommendations on paths forward to meet requirements and utilize exiting tools?

[bl-young]

The repository on the commons is out of date we are working to update that repo. Are these flows that you want to generate yourself within an eLCI json? Could you use the write_jsonld() function to write all flows to zip based on the full list of elementary flows you need? This would basically create the flow objects in exactly the same way that we do for the full FEDEFL (and would also ensure you capture any new metadata we add in the future).

write_jsonld takes flows parameter which is a df in the flow list format, so you could take the flowlist using fedelemflowlist.get_flows() and query it for all of the flows in the eLCI output.

[dt-woods]

I was not aware of that! Thanks, Ben. I'll give it a try.
@m-jamieson, you recall any other metadata hangups with the electricity baseline for publishing on the Commons?

[m-jamieson]

Hangup might be a strong word. I think that all the unit process metadata is there to satisfy FLCAC requirements...or at least they were satisfied at the time.

Along the topic of flows though, we do create a number of product and waste flows (generated by RCRAInfo) that don't fit within the elementary flows list. There are no metadata associated with these, and unfortunately, I don't know what flow-level metadata requirements there are in the commons.

We should also probably move the waste flows from "Elementary flows/emission/waste" to "Technosphere Flows" or make a new "Waste Flows" category. Guess I'll call out @bl-young again here - has there been a standard set somewhere on waste flows as provided by StEWI?

[bl-young]

Yes RCRA... I believe we have these from USEEIO as well. When we turned that into JSON this is how it manifests:
https://www.lcacommons.gov/lca-collaboration/US_Environmental_Protection_Agency/USEEIO_v2/datasets/Flows/Waste%20Flows

Is that the best solution? I may need to take that back and think on it in terms of the specific categories/contexts for those flows. I'm open to adjusting the USEEIO repo for those flows if that makes sense and you all have a better solution.

I do recommend using the UUID function in esupy (here] for consistent UUID generation. It would be good if the same RCRA flows always had the same UUID and contexts across repos.

I also seem to recall the existing baseline having some additional elementary flows that arent in the FEDEFL, maybe they were some water flows? Happy to set something up to talk through this in more detail and/or review what you have so far if that's useful.

I'll also add I have been working on creating a schema for Sources through esupy (USEPA/esupy#51) if thats valuable for you.

[bl-young]

@dt-woods in USEPA/LCIAformatter#103 I've been wanting to use the existing function in fedelemflowlist to write flows in lciafmt to make them more consistent. I started that with USEPA/LCIAformatter@36a37c4 and USEPA/fedelemflowlist@7ed509a. I realized that the way things are currently set up, it works best to pass the zipWriter object through to fedelemflowlist. Anyhow, I don't recall exactly how its set up in eLCI, but perhaps somewhere in _save_to_json you could leverage fedelemflowlist.write_jsonld() for the elementary flows. Let me know if you give it a shot. I'm happy to work through additional changes within fedelemflowlist