Learning and Sharing Technology in Informal Contexts. A Multiagent-Based Ontological Approach

An increasing debate is growing today, in both academic and research-in-action contexts, about the roles of new and traditional technologies in raising knowledge of agents involved, as well as in boosting an effective development of communities. The last century has been largely dominated by capital-intensive technologies, impacting large and populated areas. From the late 1990s up to the present days, due to social, financial, environmental concerns, new low-impact, local-born, little to medium-scale experiences have been challenging large technologies, with interesting results. The importance of such experiences seems to lay on the abilities and knowledge of local populations, which are quite difficult to emerge as formal methodologies and attain recognizable levels of generalization and sharing. Yet the effectiveness of local-based technologies is being increasingly documented, often succeeding in cases where more formal technologies had previously failed. The EU-funded ANTINOMOS project has largely dealt with local-community knowledge enhancing and managing in the water sector management, aiming at creating a real learning environment for the sharing and the active generation of knowledge through mutual synergies. In this paper, the above subject is discussed and carried out with a cross-disciplinary, cross-scale, multi-agent approach, considering the different forms of local knowledge and language involved.