Domain Experts and Natural language Processing in the Evaluation of Circular Economy Business Model Ontology

There are efforts been made globally, to switch from the take-make-dispose linear economy to Circular Economy (CE) due to the effects and wasteful nature of linear economic model. However, there are challenges and barriers that are keeping businesses from this transition despite the benefits. One of such challenge is uncertainty regarding the residual value of used products which often lead to incentives misalignment among others. While research efforts are being made to proffer solutions by proposing circular business models, the question of how reliable the new models are remains unanswered. In this paper, we propose a hybrid model of domain experts and Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques for evaluating and validating CE Business Model (CEBM) ontology. Textual data on competency questions and comments is collected from domain experts and used in the proposed model. The model identified gaps in the ontology used here, calling for further work on the ontology and the result appear satisfactory to the domain experts who participated.