Corshu
Corshu (CO-cReation of SHared Understanding on climate and air pollution policies) is an application to be sent to the strategic research council of the Academy of Finland on 11th Jan, 2017. It is based on ideas of open assessment, open policy practice, shared understanding and its implementation method, co-creation, and ontological approach to organising self-organised contributions into scientifically valid content. The research plan is an advanced version of what was applied with application Parsha from the Academy in September 2016.
Key links:
- Parsha: A previous application that is a basis for this application.
- Strategic research call December 2016. [2] fi en
- op_fi:Yhtäköyttä-hankkeen loppuraportti (a larger description of the method for decision support)
Abstract
Open data and practices are becoming common in the society. They have also brought problems: new internet tools may distribute malevolent information and distort policy making about e.g. climate change. Scientific policy support practices are not well equipped to tackle this challenge.
Shared understanding is a situation, where important issues, disagreements, valuations and reasonings are systematically documented and available for decision makers. It is hypothesized as an important method to bring science into policy and attenuate disinformation and outrage. The main objective of Corshu is to test and implement methods and technologies for producing shared understanding on pressing environmental and health issues and other policy-relevant problems.
Shared understanding will be produced in several policy-relevant, controversial situations, starting with climate change policies in Helsinki and disease burden disputes about air pollution. New topics will be chosen for the latter part of the project based on future needs. The methods applied are based on open policy practice, which has been developed and successfully used by THL; several modelling techniques such as Monte Carlo (MC), Bayesian belief networks (BBN), and directed acyclic graphs (DAG); and semantic tools such as resource description framework (RDF) database and an ontology to be specifically designed for this purpose.
The focus will be to develop practices, methods, and tools to collect contributions of political processes and systematically describing, analysing and synthesising values and statements into a coherent ontological structure. The input data may anything that is relevant for the policy process, including reports, assessments, previous policy decisions, social media discussions, and personal communications.
Corshu is based on i) a social innovation of hearing every viewpoint systematically without consensus requirement; ii) an information science innovation of an ontology and RDF database for documenting, analyzing, synthesizing and disseminating political discourse; and iii) a technological innovation of an interface to facilitate participation, knowledge retrieval, learning, and policy support. Our hypothesis is that scientific knowledge prevails in this process and conclusions are more coherent and robust than with the current political practices.
Corshu will extensively use participation and co-creation in its studies and actively share its results. It will use experiments and randomized controlled trials to test performance of the innovations: whether they actually can collect, synthesise and describe information from participants to their satisfaction; whether the synthesis is informative and semantically coherent and usable for semiautomatic analyses; whether the disputes can be identified and their impacts described; and whether such analyses actually help policy makers avoid emotional, fast thinking. If they do, many complex environmental and health problems will come closer to a solution.
Tasks, WPs and partners
Coordinator: Jouni Tuomisto, THL
Subprojects ⇤--#: . Subprojects and partners are not yet confirmed. These are drafts about what the tasks and roles could be. --Jouni (talk) 15:35, 15 December 2016 (UTC) (type: truth; paradigms: science: attack)
- THL Impact Assessment Unit (leader: Jouni Tuomisto, coordinator. Participants: Arja Asikainen, Otto Hänninen, Päivi Meriläinen)
- Helsinki Environment Centre? (leader: Markus Lukin. Participants: Jari Viinanen, Mira Jarkko, Petteri Huuska, Sonja-Maria Ignatius)
- VTT? (leader: Sami Majaniemi?. Participants: ?)
- OKFFI? (leader: Teemu Ropponen?. Participants: ?)
- CSC Oy? (leader: Jessica Parland-von Essen?. Participants: Totti Mäkelä?)
- HIIT? (leader: Kai Kuikkaniemi?. Participants: ?)
- HSY? (leader: Susanna Kankaanpää?)
- Future Earth Finland? (leader: Tanja Suni?)
Workpackage | Research question | Subprojects involved | Other |
---|---|---|---|
WP1. Problem formulation: Defining decisions situations | What decisions, options, objectives, and issues relate to the decision situations that are to be analysed? | Hki, HSY, THL, FES?, OKFFI | |
WP2. Ontologies: Development of an ontology for collaborative decision support. | How to link any contribution to a coherent semantic description of a decision situation? | VTT, HIIT, THL | |
WP3. Co-creation: Inviting existing networks to co-create | What approaches enable and motivate individuals and existing networks to start collaborate on a semantic web-workspace? | FES, Hki, THL, OKFFI, Hki, HSY | |
WP4. Web-workspace: Development of a web-workspace with participation, modelling, and semantic functionalities. | What functionalities are needed in a web-workspace for co-creation of decision descriptions, and how can they be implemented using open source code? | CSC, VTT, THL | All other partners using and commenting the web-workspace |
WP5. Fusion models: Development of interfaces to use many different modelling approaches (MC, BBN, DAG, RDF) in a single system. | How can different modelling approaches be combined in a coherent way to create knowledge crystals? | THL, CSC, VTT | |
WP6. Implementation: Participating in policy processes and public discussions. | How is information from semantic systems accepted in political discussions? Does shared understanding alleviate disputes? | FES, Hki, HSY, THL, OKFFI | |
WP7. Project management | Can the methods and technologies developed be used even for managing the project itself? | THL | All others participate |
Two critical questions:
- Use of information in decision making
- Sustainable growth
Ontologies
Ontologies are systematic languages used to describe topics in a standardised way. In this project, we will specifically use web ontology language (OWL 2) and resource description framework (RDF) databases to support the content described in the the OWL language. Here are some links to descriptions of the methods.
- en:Web Ontology Language a general description on Wikipedia. On W3C website: Overview, Primer (syntax and examples, Quick reference guide, Direct semantics (expressed as logical clauses),
- SPARQL language in R,
- Open policy practice ontology described in WebProtégé
- [3] "has as part" in Wikidata ----#: . Check what can be found from OWL and RDFS and what needs to be specified in the specific ontology. --Jouni (talk) 15:07, 5 December 2016 (UTC) (type: truth; paradigms: science: comment)
- [1]
- Eero Hyvönen, ontology professor [4]