Abstract
Those involved in the management of the aquatic environment use computer-based decision support systems (DSS) to deal with the complex, open, unstructured problems they typically face. There is increasing recognition that these DSS need to deal with knowledge, whether that used by experienced managers to select the relevant data, information and experience needed to make a decision, or that held by those with a stake in the management in the aquatic environment. In order to study how the knowledge of the domain might be managed, we focus upon the sub-domain of urban wastewater management (UWM). Specifically, we look at the knowledge used to interpret frameworks and guidelines for the planning of infrastructure for UWM. Case studies involving interviews with domain practitioners are presented, and a corpus and computational linguistics based approach to the analysis of the resulting verbal reports is described. The link between knowledge and language is central, and here we present evidence that those in the domain use a special language which exhibits structure. This structure can be exploited to enable the language to be operated upon and analysed by computer programs, and is therefore of significance for knowledge management. We have shown how knowledge, in a restricted sense, can automatically be extracted from text and disseminated across the Internet to planners, policy makers and other stakeholders. Our analysis has revealed emergent knowledge - that which is complementary to and useful in the interpretation of repositories of knowledge - held by stakeholders in Kingston, Jamaica. In that this emergent knowledge was discovered by comparing and contrasting verbal reports with specialist texts deemed to be representative of the documented knowledge of the domain, it provides evidence to support the continued development of the method described. Though presently labour intensive, the ever-increasing availability of texts in digital form and even developments in speech processing suggest that the method may eventually be further automated. That this method for the management of knowledge will facilitate knowledge creation, founded on a cycle of externalization, socialization, combination and internalization of knowledge, is a possibility. It may, therefore, contribute to the development of concepts and technologies which will enable the sustainable management of the aquatic environment to proceed.