No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
The Conversion of Data Into Information for Public Participation in Decision Making Processes
Abstract
It is now becoming impossible in many countries to proceed with new constructions and management practices in the water sector of the economy without involving the general public in the associated decision making processes. This trend towards a greater public participation is essentially asocio-technicaldevelopment that is itself dependent upon, and indeed inseparable from, sequences of technical innovations, as exemplified by the Internet and second and third generation telephony. It is a consequence of this situation that field data and model results, that were previously employed only by engineers and scientists, and employed for the most part technically, have now to be processed into forms which can be assimilated by the general population and employed politically, legally and altogether less technocratically. This process begins with the transformation of data into information, frequently through the intercession of modeling activities. The management of this activity falls within the purview ofInformation Management.The process may be taken further through the transformation of information into knowledge. This activity then falls, at least in principle, under the aegis ofKnowledge Management.Beyond this again, it is essential that knowledge should transform into understanding if public participation is to proceed at all equitably and effectively. Within the sector of water and the aquatic environment, all of the above developments, as enabled by advanced information and communication technologies, fall within the ambit of Hydroinformatics.This kind of development that is occurring in hydroinfbrmatics clearly necessitates a rather complete rethinking of data collection and processing strategies and associated network designs.
... Already at the level of numerical modelling Mike Abbott introduced these notions as critically important. His famous definition of a 'model as a collection of indicative signs that serves as an expressive sign' (e.g., Abbott, 2003) was frequently misunderstood, but it was already clearly presenting how different indicative signs (e.g., the colour red along a river stretch) could create overall expressions (e.g., severe water quality degradation), which could eventually create symbolic knowledge to a particular stakeholder (loss of fishing) (for a clearer elaboration, see Vojinovic & Abbott, 2012, pp. 184-187). ...
Hydroinformatics was established 30 years ago as a novel discipline in which computer modelling of water was combined with developments of Informational and Computational Technologies for purposes of introducing new and different approaches to water engineering, management, and decision support. The late Professor Michael B. Abbott is widely recognized as founding father of this field. This book presents the original ideas about the field of hydroinformatics, primarily introduced in the works of Abbott, together with critical assessment of its current developments.
The first chapter re-visits the motivations for establishing the field of hydroinformatics, together with an assessment of current research and practice regarding the extent and characteristics that relate to the original ideas introduced by Abbott. Six following chapters have similar structure, each addressing a particular aspect of hydroinformatics, as follows: computational hydraulics and its role in establishing hydroinformatics, integration of artificial intelligence and computational hydraulics, hydroinformatics contributions to hydrology, transformations of water professions and businesses by hydroinformatics, hydroinformatics developments in China, and evolution and key characteristics of hydroinformatics education. Each chapter relates to already published works of Abbott. All chapters are written by contributors who were past collaborators of Abbott and are still active in the field of hydroinformatics.
The second part of the book contains seven articles written by Abbott (some with his collaborators), selected to cover as broadly as possible the wide spectrum of Abbott's contributions to computational hydraulics and hydroinformatics. The book is a tribute to Abbott's contributions to hydroinformatics, and it provides an assessment of the current status of the field, perceived from within the context of Abbott's original ideas.
... The broad coverage of DIKW manipulation encouraged us to propose resource processing based on the difference of the conversion cost of DIKW architecture for IoT applications. Conversion cost has been well studied in many domains, including from database to ontology [50] and between data and information [51]. ...
Web services are middleware designed to support the interoperation between different software systems and devices over the Web. Today, we encounter a variety of situations in which services deployed on the Internet of things (IoT), such as wireless sensor networks, ZigBee networks, and mobile edge computing frameworks, have become a widely used infrastructure that has become more flexible, intelligent and automated. This system supports multimedia applications, E-commerce transactions, business collaborations and information processing. However, how to manage these services has been a popular topic in IoT research. Existing research covers numerous resource models, based on sensors or human interactions. For everything as a service, things are available as a service include products, processes, resource management and security provision. To cope with the challenge of how to manage these services, we present an extension of Data, Information, Knowledge and Wisdom architecture as a resource expression model to construct a systematic approach to modeling both entity and relationship elements. The entity elements are formalized from a fully typed, multiple-related dimensions perspective to obtain a whole frequency-value-based representation of entities in the real world. A relationship model is extended and applied to define resource models based on relationships defined from a semantics perspective that is based on our proposed existence-level reasoning. Then, a processing framework is proposed that seeks to optimize the searching efficiency of typed resources in terms of IoT data, information and knowledge inside an integrated architecture, and the framework includes Data Graph, Information Graph and Knowledge Graph. We concentrate on improving performance in accessing and processing resources and providing resource security protection by utilizing the cost difference of both type conversions of resources and traversing on resources. Finally, an application scenario is simulated to illustrate the usage of the proposed framework. This scenario shows the feasibility and effectiveness of our method, considering the conversion, traversing and storage costs. Our method can help improve the optimization of services and scheduling resources of multimedia systems.
In many tropical island settings in the world and as a result of human activities and tropical weather conditions, urban areas have been vulnerable to special kinds of hazards. The most common and the most widely experienced hazard events for these localities are tropical cyclones and accompanying storm surges, flash floods and landslides. Such events can cause serious damages to the drainage systems, roads, properties, receiving environment and even the loss of human lives. Given the threats of climate change, such natural disasters are likely to strengthen this trend in the coming years. In many situations, it is the population living in low-lying urban areas that are most exposed to these disasters. From this, it follows that the scientific and professional communities have a responsibility to evolve better stormwater management approaches directed to minimizing hazard risks owing to urban flooding, even while addressing different climatic conditions. Although, the physics, chemistry and biology of processes related to water are universal, some of the processes and implementation of measures to manage water vary in terms of the climate conditions, geographical location, availability of resources and local culture. In tropical island conditions, where flash floods occur frequently, alongside the obvious structural measures, effective non-structural measures, such as better hazard mitigation and prevention, improved preparedness and introduction of warning systems, well organised pre-emptive action and emergency response activities, have to be coupled together in order to minimize damages. Furthermore, as the management of urban flooding is an emerging subject, it is necessary to understand that such a topic needs to be treated holistically, and so in a multi-disciplinary manner. This implies that the public, town planners, economists, lawyers, emergency services, and many other groups need to be involved, along with the engineers, surveyors and contractors, in developing strategic plans for hazard reduction, operational management and post-event recovery. Thus the stakeholders have to be involved in the decision-making processes (e.g., Abbot 2007, available at www.eiil.net). The present paper describes an integrated stormwater management approach oriented towards the small islands in tropical climates which continuously tend to suffer from flash floods. The approach outlined here draws on the work experiences gained in the Caribbean.
The relatively clean and clear water in the Øresund makes it a difficult environment in which to carry out large dredging operations. For this reason, the Øresunds-konsortiet initiated an environmental monitoring and environmental management programme called " feedback monitoring " to navigate this huge and complicated construction work safely through a set of strict environmental regulations laid down by the Danish and Swedish authorities. Environmental monitoring traditionally uses methods that need a long period of observation before one can judge with statistical certainty whether a development is a lasting change or an occasionally occurring natural variation. In connection with the construction of the Øresund Link, an environmental monitoring programme has been established which allows a much quicker evaluation of impacts, in order to make adjustments in the construction activities as observed effects follow or vary from predictions. This so-called feedback monitoring includes selected variables that over short periods of time show quanti-fiable changes as a result of impacts from the construction work. The use of computer models makes it possible at an early stage to assess whether a feedback action should be taken or not, given the results of the monitoring and the future work plans.
Through the rapidly ongoing process of electronic encapsulation of information and knowledge, a new kind of space opens up in hydraulics between the places and ways in which information and knowledge are produced, through research, and the places and ways in which these are applied, through engineering and management practice. It is this space that is now being occupied by hydroinformatics. The special problems of presenting hydroinformatics arc introduced in relation to the types of electronic knowledge encapsulators that are currently being brought together and integrated in real-time-control, alarm-handling, computer-aided design, computer- aided management and other systems. The new challenges that hydroinformatics presents are outlined and related to the contributions to this special edition of the Journal of Hydraulics Research.The distinction between information and knowledge and the most immediate consequences of this distinction are set out in an appendix to this introductory paper.
The practice of hydroinformatics calls for an education in a number of basic subjects and a further education and training in the ways in which knowledge and information arising from the corresponding subject areas can be integrated into hydroinformatics products and services. Even if only because of its multidisciplinary basis, hydroinformatics is not suited to a conventional undergraduate education, so that education must proceed at a postgraduate level and be augmented by practical training. A postgraduate course in hydroinformatics and its associated training programme are described and some if the more basic problems that have been experienced are introduced.
The motorway and railway connection between Denmark and Sweden, opened on 1 July 2000, when taken together with the connection across the Great Belt between the largest Danish islands, now provides a direct link between the Scandinavian peninsular and the rest of Europe. At a total cost of some 8 billion US dollars, these projects represented the largest infrastructural investments of their kind in Europe. Although backed by strong political and economic interests, these projects were also opposed by a part of the public and especially by political and environmental interest groups. This opposition was particularly pronounced in the case of the Denmark-Sweden link, partly owing to its location in a densely populated area and partly due to the potential impacts of the proposed link on the very sensitive local and regional marine environment. Thus, alongside the task of designing and constructing the physical link, the consortium that was responsible for its realisation, Øresundsbro Konsortiet, had to find ways to satisfy these many diverse interests. This paper describes how Øresundsbro Konsortiet, being an owner that valued constructive partnership, took up these challenges in their management, and how the environmental concerns were accommodated in the design and construction methods. Furthermore, it describes how the socio-technical approaches already taken up and developed within hydroinformatics in earlier projects were taken much further in the case of the Denmark-Sweden link. Finally, the paper describes the role of hydroinformatics in the various phases of the project and its significance in achieving the successful completion. The role of hydroinformatics as an important technology in facilitating stakeholder dialogue is thereby also clearly illustrated.
The rapidly developing practice of encapsulating knowledge in electronic media is shown to lead necessarily to the restructuring of the knowledge itself. The consequences of this for hydraulics, hydrology and more general water-resources management are investigated in particular relation to current process-simulation, real-time control and advice-serving systems. The generic properties of the electronic knowledge encapsulator are described, and attention is drawn to the manner in which knowledge ‘goes into hiding’ through encapsulation. This property is traced in the simple situations of pure mathesis and in the more complex situations of taxinomia using one example each from hydraulics and hydrology. The consequences for systems architectures are explained, pointing to the need for multi-agent architectures for ecological modelling and for more general hydroinformatics systems also. The relevance of these developments is indicated by reference to ongoing projects in which they are currently being realised. In conclusion, some more general epistemological aspects are considered within the same context. As this contribution is so much concerned with the processes of signification and communication, it has been partly shaped by the theory of semiotics, as popularised by Eco (A Theory of Semiotics, Indiana University, Bloomington, 1977).
Environmental management and monitoring at the Oeresund Fixed Link
- A Jensen
- Je Yngby
Range of tidal hydraulics
- M B Abbott
- MB Abbott
Abbott, M.B. (1997) Range of tidal hydraulics, J. Hydraulic Eng'g, ASCE, 123, 4,
257-275.
Précis de Sémiotique Générale
- J-M Klinkenberg
Klinkenberg, J-M. (1996) Précis de Sémiotique Générale, De Boek et Lancier, Paris.
Prècis de Ss iii oiiytr_ CtènèraleDe Bock et Lancier
- J-M Klinkenberg
- J-M Klinkenberg