Abstract
This paper reports on a project in which a group support system (GSS) equipped with a causal mapping facility was used to acquire knowledge from experts in seven European cities in order to understand the systemicity of risks which cities may face. The practical constraints demanded that participants’ experience and wisdom about the city risk environment was collected in a short period of time: three 1-day workshops. The acquisition of knowledge posed a number of important epistemological challenges which are explored in our discussion. The GSS was faced with the need to (1) facilitate sharing of knowledge with others, (2) manage the complexity of expert knowledge, (3) acknowledge the time demands on experts, (4) manage and merge multiple perspectives, and (5) acknowledge the subjectivity of knowledge in this domain. By discussing how the GSS process attended directly to these epistemological issues and to methodological considerations that linked to these issues, the paper contributes to a better understanding of the application of GSS for knowledge acquisition, particularly in comparison with other possible methods.
Highlights
In many situations, building decision support tools requires acquiring a large amount of expert knowledge
We have discussed why a group support system (GSS) was chosen for knowledge acquisition due to its ability to address the five epistemological challenges raised in Sect. 2, and we have shown how the specific GSS used, Group Explorer, addressed the five challenges
We highlight methodological considerations which emerged during the knowledge acquisition process, how they link to the 5 challenges and how the GSS process used above attended to each of them
Summary
In many situations, building decision support tools requires acquiring a large amount of expert knowledge. Unlike previous applications of GSS for knowledge acquisition (Liou and Nunamaker 1990), our purpose was not to build a knowledge base for an expert system, but rather to develop an understanding of the interaction between risks and so inform the construction of a decision support tool aimed at operationalizing city resilience This novel application of GSS, in turn, brings new epistemological and methodological considerations that we address in our discussion. We subsequently introduce a research project where a GSS was used to gather experts views from participants from multiple organizations with respect to future risk scenarios that a city might face These risk scenarios were used to build a resilience-oriented decision support tool. We reflect on some of the trade-offs that are made when using a GSS compared to other methods of knowledge acquisition
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