Thesis
Biodiversity as a stake of enterprise strategy and territorial development: needs and opportunities for an efficient knowledge mediation
I. IDENTITY
II. DESCRIPTION
III. FILTERS
According to some authors the environmental issues human societies are currently facing can’t be solved without an interdisciplinary approach. Such an approach is not easy to carry out, as having either experts from different fields or stakeholders with different background requires a common grounding that is often lacking and must be created for the occasion. Most issues involving either human societies or biodiversity usually show enough complexity to qualify these problems as “post-normal”.
At the same time ICT usage has evolved to a point where knowledge management can be participatory and users are encouraged to label digital objects for the other users to retrieve these objects intuitively. Despite hierarchies and taxonomies still being relevant, this new way to reference and anchor information, however “fuzzy”, could provide the required flexibility to help carry out such tasks as solving post-normal issues. The main questions raised through this PhD project are as follows:
- How can participants with various backgrounds reach a common grounding when accomplishing a collaborative task?
- How can digital environments, ICTs in general, facilitate such processes?
- How can high performance visualization, collaboration and interaction platforms such as DIGISCOPE nodes help explore complex issues?
The main framework on this project is the analysis of interactions between participants solving a complex problem. Such an analysis will be performed on work meeting transcriptions and digital traces of computer supported collaborative work, these situations being regarded as “co-design” tasks. Interaction patterns accompanying transfers of knowledge regarding biodiversity and its management will be focused on and factors explaining the quality of such transfers will be isolated.
A better understanding of the factors favoring an efficient interdisciplinary problem-solving such as required by environmental questions especially biological conservation issues. A software engine prototype based on a virtual world that should facilitate the production, storage and use of interdisciplinary knowledge for a given problematic and the mobilization of its components for a different problematic.
This PhD project relies on the DIGISCOPE “EquipEx” and was funded for that purpose, it therefore intends to make an extensive use of the node that will be installed at the OVSQ.
Steering committee:
- Philippe LANCELEUR, Multimedia project manager, REEDS, OVSQ/UVSQ – philippe.lanceleur@reeds.uvsq.fr
- Hervé DE FERAUDY, Policy Officer « Investissements d'avenir du Grand emprunt », OVSQ/UVSQ - Herve.DeFeraudy@latmos.ipsl.fr