Towards an ISO-Compliant upper-domain ontology for EU sustainability reporting and decision-making using AI

The European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) came into force in 2024. However, organisations, both large and small, encountered significant challenges in accessing, integrating and analysing relevant sustainability data points from heterogeneous siloed data stores across their value chains in accordance with complex disclosure requirements. Thus, the European Commission introduced omnibus legislation in 2025 that reduced the number of firms covered by about 77% and data points by 70%. This paper addresses the underlying problem and proposes an ISO-compliant upper-domain Organisational Sustainability Reporting Ontology (OSRO) to help organisations apply AI ontology-based data access and integration mechanisms, as part of a data fabric architecture, and to automate and informate sustainability decision-making and reporting. The ontology will also enable organisations to apply AI's LLM and ML as part of a neurosymbolic AI approach to enhance decision-making using firm-specific sensitive data.