A presentation prepared for the American Association of Geographers (AAG) 2010 Annual Meeting in Washington DC. The presentation discusses work done by the University of Redlands and the SDS Consortium to organize and provide access to the body of knowledge regarding Spatial Decision Support
8. Multiple categories of knowledge involved, including expert knowledge and layman knowledge.http://geoanalytics.net/VisA-SDS-2006/
9. Definition of Spatial Decision Support (SDS) Spatial decision support is the computational or informational assistance for making better informed decisions about problems with a geographic or spatial component. This support assists with the development, evaluation and selection of proper policies, plans, scenarios, projects, interventions, or solution strategies. Spatial Decision Support Consortium, 2008
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11. Vast amount of information/knowledge on spatial decision support
27. Set of formally defined relations to other conceptsThe content of the SDS Portal is formalized it can be queried easily
28. SDS Knowledge Portal Incremental development of the SDS portal Knowledge Portal - User accessing knowledge about SDS, learning about decision process, methods, etc. Resource Portal - User seeking resource info: tools, models, data sources, case studs, literature, etc Solution Portal - User seeking resource recommendations for their specific decision problem solution
In the context of adaptive management, we go through the cycle of identifying the problems in the current state of our ecosystem, identify our goal for a desired state of the system, and, based on our scientific understanding of various aspect of the ecosystem, we investigate and assess the current conditions, come up with alternative plans to reach our goal, and select the best one to implement, preferably after having dome some impact analysis of the actions that we are going to take. And we monitor our plan implementation and its effectiveness, and adjust our plan in the next cycle if needed.Because of the complexity of the ecosystem, and because the complexity in evaluating our potential actions, computational support is often needed in the process of such decision making.There has been a vast body of theories, methods, resources including tools, data sources, etc. developed to help solving complex spatial decision problems. Spatial decision support is an active research area in GIScience and various other research communities. One of our purposes of developing the SDS Knowledge Portal is to organize the vast body of knowledge and resources, to create a portal that our army clients can come and gain a better understanding of the decision making process, and to find the kind of decision process workflow, methods, tools, data, literature and example case studies for that are pertinent to their decision problem at hand.
In 2008 about 30 researchers, experts, and practitioners representing about 25 agencies met at the University of Redlands and formed an informal SDS Consortium. One of the primary objectives was to establish some “semantic clarity” by defining terms and concepts within the field. One of these definitions was SDS itself…Thedefinition of spatial decision support has been broadened by the SDS Consortium. It includes not only the support/assistance for choosing alternative solutions, but also the support/assistance from the beginning to the end of the decision making/planning process and beyond (plan implementation, monitoring, review)
Beyond just Knowledge Portal
To this end, we have collaborated with a group of experts in this field including scholars, practitioners and toolmakers in SDS to develop a conceptual framework to capture the body of knowledge in this field, and to systematically classify the various resources useful for spatial decision making, and to provide a standard set of terms describing this body of knowledge for a user community. The conceptual framework drives the browsing and searching functions on the Portal.
Play Lindsey’s animation.It starts with a typical structured decision process, with its phases and each phase has sub steps. Then it zooms in to one of the steps (alternative ranking), shows the various information associated with this step. Part of the information is about some commonly used methods. Zoom in to this method (weighted linear combination). Look at some detailed information about this method. This method is one of the method in a method hierarchy. This method is implemented by a bunch of tools. One of them is EMDS. Zoom to EMDS. Show various attributes of EMDS. One of them is about the case studies where EMDS was applied. Zoom to this case study. Case studies are recorded with a set of parameters. One of the is the decision problem type it addressed. Show the decision type hierarchy.The animation stops at this graph. If you could embed the animation in the ppt, that would be great, otherwise you have to play it outside of the slides. This is only a tiny segment of the entire ontology graph.Many nodes and links are not in here (e.g. there are ~ 100 methods)Each nodes here may have many more links to other nodes
Concept search – more intelligent than keyword search. It accommodates synonyms and acronyms of a term, and can looks up other relevant terms based on the hierarchical relations among concepts in the ontology. E.g. if the user is looking for tools that implement multi-criteria analysis method, the Portal will return the tools that implement any of the sub method of multi-criteria analysis method.
A few words about this potential SDS resource recommendation function:
One of our research agenda item is to add solution resource recommendation to the SDS Knowledge Portal.The user comes to the portal with a decision problem, and describes this problem based on a set of parameters pre-defined in the SDS ontology. Because the decision problem types in the ontology are linked with other types of concepts such as appropriate decision process workflows, methods, tools, etc., the Portal’s inference engine may be able to conduct inferencing and produce a subset of SDS resources suitable for the user’s decision problem.
The user describes various aspects about their decision problem by choose parameters values pre-defined in the ontology.
Completed input form where the user answered questions about their decision problem, in terms of general description, the decision context, application domain, knowledge domain, decision problem type, problem objective, etc.
These tool attributescan be used as part of standard parameters for registering tools in an online tools registry, and thus exposing a tool’s various attributes for the system to determined whether it could be interoperable with other tools.