Introduction

One of the primary goals for HERO was to provide a knowledge management system for interdisciplinary research that also provides a link between human understanding and formal systems, for example databases, analyses, and models. Chapter 2 elaborated extensively on how concepts that people create and use in their attempts to understand and manage Earth's dynamic systems are defined differently depending on place and situation. It was specifically pointed out that it is of particular importance for multidisciplinary research such as HERO to articulate how concepts and understanding change with context. While Chapter 3 demonstrated progress made in developing support for the process of collaboratory research this chapter addresses representational issues involved in linking human understanding with formal systems. We present two ways of modeling knowledge about both the conceptual understanding of human–environment interaction and the process of decision-making.

A parameterized representation of uncertain conceptual spaces

The collaboratory Web portal (Chapter 2) embodies the idea of a customizable window onto distributed resources and ways to make these accessible to a group of users. For a portal to be able to filter and customize the content to a specific user community, one of the critical components to any such solution is a metadata structure that describes and represents available resources. The goal is to enable users to exchange methods, data, ideas, and results. Most results presented in this book were achieved by negotiating a common understanding, adhering to a shared vocabulary, and using a common set of methods.