The Cooperative Management of Complex Knowledge in Planning: Building a Semantic-Based Model for Hydrological Issues

The management of issues related to water resources, a highly complex domain, has increasingly highlighted the critical role of knowledge towards shared, useful and effective planning decisions. Hydrology is an applied science with a very large theoretical base, its corpus borders with many others science domains. The clarification of theoretical, methodological, data, language and meaning issues and differences is of central importance. Therefore, the development of a knowledge management system with semantic extensions can meet some of the needs described. The main objective of this work is to investigate the potential for implementing a knowledge management system with semantic extensions, as well as to propose a functional architecture. To achieve that, first a KMS with semantic exstensions has been implemented and then the same system has been populated with an experimental knowledge content. Furthermore, a bottom-up extraction from the KMS of a simple ontology representing the data inserted in the KMS is considered, in order to show the KMS feature of clarifying and improving inter-domain communication, to enhance a common semantic understanding.