Consensual Knowledge Research Articles

Is there consensus on child violence exposure measures? A study of six recommended instruments

ABSTRACT Background: International research has established that children and adolescents are at high risk for being exposed to violence. A systematic review published in 2023 recommended six child and adolescent self-report violence against children (VAC) measures, based on their psychometric properties, in a systematic COnsensus-based Standards for the selection of health Measurement INstruments (COSMIN) review. However, the degree of overlap and heterogeneity was not part of the analysis. Objective: To compare the six measures with respect to item overlap and differences concerning specification of exposure dimensions. Method: A content analysis of the original 174 items resulted in a reduction to 38 unique items. These items were organized visually in a co-occurrence circle using an adapted version of Fried’s R code. Furthermore, a pairwise comparison of event lists was performed using the Jaccard index. Results: There was a modest overlap among the six measures. Only one item was present in all six measures, only two items were present in four measures, and 78% of the items were present in just one or two measures. The overall overlap between the six measures was 25%. Conclusions: The lack of overlap among measures reflects a heterogeneity of definitions and purposes. It also impedes progress in research, as comparisons between various studies are difficult to make in a valid and reliable way. The lack of consensus also delays efficient political initiatives, because solid, consensual knowledge about the prevalence of VAC does not exist.

Exploring the Specificity of Nanozymes.

Nanozymes, nanomaterials exhibiting enzyme-like activities, have emerged as a prominent interdisciplinary field over the past decade. To date, over 1200 different nanomaterials have been identified as nanozymes, covering four catalytic categories: oxidoreductases, hydrolases, isomerases, and lyases. Catalytic activity and specificity are two pivotal benchmarks for evaluating enzymatic performance. Despite substantial progress being made in quantifying and optimizing the catalytic activity of nanozymes, there is still a lack of in-depth research on the catalytic specificity of nanozymes, preventing the formation of consensual knowledge and impeding a more refined and systematic classification of nanozymes. Recently, debates have emerged regarding whether nanozymes could possess catalytic specificity similar to that of enzymes. This Perspective discusses the specificity of nanozymes by referring to the catalytic specificity of enzymes, highlights the specificity gap between nanozymes and enzymes, and concludes by offering our perspective on future research on the specificity of nanozymes.

An interval type‐2 fuzzy ontological model: Predicting water quality from sensory data

SUMMARYWith the advent of break‐through sensing technology, performing data capturing and analysis for knowledge engineering has become more opportunistic. The task of efficiently analyzing sensor based data for effective decision making poses a significant challenge. Conventional prediction and recommender systems lack comprehensive analysis of all parameters and aspects, thus compromising prediction results. At the decision‐making level, traditional knowledge driven prediction systems deploy classical ontology for knowledge representation and analysis. However, classical ontologies are not considered as powerful tools due to their inability to handle vagueness in data for real‐world applications. On the contrary, fuzzy ontology deals with the issue of hazy and uncertain data for effective analysis to give promising results. This work presents interval type 2 fuzzy ontological knowledge model that predicts water quality of sensor based water samples and providing solutions with respect to the corresponding quality state. The proposed knowledge model constitutes of two newly developed ontologies: water sensor observations ontology (crisp ontology to model sensor observational data) and water quality ontology (interval type 2 fuzzy ontology for modeling the water quality prediction process). The inference mechanism is based on interval type‐2 fuzzy partitioning and computation. Besides water quality prediction and providing solutions, the proposed model handles the issue of interoperability and exchange of consensual knowledge among multiple disciplines. The proposed knowledge model is validated with real‐life water sensor based parameterized data captured from various geographically dispersed monitoring stations with approximately 50,000 samples at each station.

Rehabilitation and lumbar surgery: the French recommendations for clinical practice.

Indications and techniques of rehabilitation differ widely across types of lumbar surgery, including timing (before or after surgery) and prescriptions (surgeons but also medical or paramedical professionals). This project aimed to build consensual recommendations for practice in this context. The SOFMER methodology was used to establish recommendations for physical medicine and rehabilitation: a steering committee defined the types of lumbar surgery involved and developed the main questions to be addressed; a scientific committee performed a literature review for grading evidence and proposed the first version of recommendations, which were discussed during a dedicated session at the national Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine congress; then an e-Delphi method with cross-professional experts was used to finalise recommendations and reach a multidisciplinary consensus. The main questions developed were the value of rehabilitation before and after surgery, timing and type of rehabilitation, benefit of supervision and instrumental rehabilitation, value of patient education, and complementary interventions concerning rehabilitation for discectomy, fusion, and disc prosthesis (excluding decompression for spinal stenosis). The literature review identified 60 articles, but for several of the questions, no article in the literature addressed the issue. The multidisciplinary scientific committee analysed the literature and addressed the questions to propose the first version of a set of 23 recommendations. The congress session failed to answer all questions or to reach consensus for all items. After a three-step e-Delphi, 20 recommendations were retained, for which consensus among experts was reached. The recommendations are applicable only to patients without a neurological lesion. These recommendations provide important and consensual knowledge to assist clinicians in decision-making for rehabilitation in lumbar surgery. Despite many of the recommendations relying exclusively on expert opinion rather than published evidence, this approach is an important advance to improve concordance among healthcare professionals.

How to build the legitimacy of regional integration on rational foundations: a case of epistemic communities in the Baltic Sea area

ABSTRACT In periods of uncertainty or during critical junctures, scientific advice may be in high demand to provide legitimacy for political decision makers. This article outlines the evolution of expert forms of knowledge and the way those have shaped Baltic Sea region building, including its consultative and collaborative frameworks of agenda setting. The selected cases include HELCOM, the Copenhagen School of international relations and the Baltic Science Network. This article offers an explanation of how these epistemic collectives have produced consensual knowledge, generated legitimacy, and engendered agency of scientific research findings and knowledge-based decisions in national, transnational, and macro-regional settings.

International R&D Collaboration for a Global Aging Society: Focusing on Aging-Related National-Funded Projects.

An international research and development (R&D) collaboration for aging-related projects is necessary to alleviate the severe economic/healthcare/humanitarian challenges of a global aging society. This study presents a practical/systematic framework that enables the provision of information on the research goals, the status of science and technology, and action plans of aging-related program development processes. We used data on aging-related national-funded projects from the United States of America, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Japan, and Korea. We collected data on 6318 national-funded projects, subsequently designating research fields to each project. By analyzing the content of the projects, their representative research fields, and the associated keywords, we assessed the general goals of six different research fields. To recognize the current scientific capabilities of these research fields, we divided the projects by clusters. We provided information on research organizations, specific goals (i.e., project title), project periods, and the funding related to the projects. These may be used by stakeholders in various governments/institutions/industries during future discussions regarding the establishment of an international R&D collaboration strategy. The approach we proposed may facilitate the linkage between knowledge and action during strategy development by maximizing scientific legitimacy, developing consensual knowledge, and minimizing diverging opinions among stakeholders.

The GeoCore ontology: A core ontology for general use in Geology

Domain ontologies assume the role of representing, in a formal way, a consensual knowledge of a community over a domain. This task is especially difficult in a wide domain like Geology, which is composed of diversified science resting on a large variety of conceptual models that were developed over time. The meaning of the concepts used by the various professionals often depends on the particular vision that they have of a domain according to their background and working habits. Ontology development in Geology thus necessitates a drastic elucidation of the concepts and vocabulary used by geologists.This article intends to contribute to solving these difficulties by proposing a core ontology named GeoCore Ontology resting on the BFO top ontology, specially designed for describing scientific fields. GeoCore Ontology contains well-founded definitions of a limited set of general concepts within the Geology field that are currently considered by all geologists whatever their skill. It allows modelers to separately consider a geological object, the substance that constitutes it, the boundaries that limit it and the internal arrangement of the matter inside it. The core ontology also allows the description of the existentially dependent qualities attached to a geological object and the geological process that generated it in a particular geological age. This small set of formally defined and described concepts combined with concepts from BFO provides a backbone for deriving by subsumption more specialized geological concepts and also constitutes a baseline for integrating different existent domain ontologies within the Geology domain.The GeoCore ontology and the methodology that we used for building it, provide solutions for unveiling major misunderstanding regarding the concepts that are commonly used for formulating geological interpretations. This will facilitate the communication of this information to external Geology users and its integration in domain applications.

Valores éticos y cambio tecnológico en la comunicación audiovisual: de la ciencia a la tecnología

Valores eticos y cambio tecnologico en la comunicacion audiovisual: de la ciencia a la tecnologia Valores eticos e mudanca tecnologica na comunicacao audiovisual: da ciencia a tecnologia The fact that science involves values, including ethical values, is clearly accepted in the current context. Audiovisual communication has ethical values as a scientific activity (both as an applied science and as application of this science) and technological work. Both facets involve free human actions. This article reflects on the ethical values of communication as an applied science and as application of science in order to reach deontological codes. If communication is understood as a science, professional practice cannot be reduced to cumulative and consensual knowledge alone, but it is necessary to identify the ethical values that validity it and allow to use general criteria in specific cases. In short, we must contemplate the framework of ethical values in audiovisual communication as applied science and as application of this science, which must be reflected in university education and the preparation of deontological codes, because ethical values influence future communicative problems and the action guidelines to face them in professional practice. Moreover, technological changes in audiovisual communication are based on creative transformations of the real, thus giving rise to new realities that need to be ethically considered in terms of objectives, processes and results. Para citar este articulo / to reference this article / para citar este artigo Arrojo, M. J. (2019). Valores eticos y cambio tecnologico en la comunicacion audiovisual: de la ciencia a la tecnologia. Palabra Clave 22(1), e2218. DOI: 10.5294/pacla.2019.22.1.8

CHALLENGES OF TEACHING THE ECONOMIC SCIENCES IN GEORGIAN UNIVERSITIES

The teaching process of economic sciences must serve to train the competitive staff that will be successful in the field of economic theory and practical economics. Under the formation of market economy and economic transformation, the neo-liberal economic theory replaced the teaching of Marxist political economy in the university education space, for which a favorable environment for the occupation of the prevailing position in the country and the university was caused by many external and internal factors. But, in fact, we have still taken a stand that promotes unilateral development of economic thinking and excludes the pluralism of scientific thinking and the development of critical thinking. In the modern conditions, the use of “laissez faire” doctrine without the realization of state regulation is an abstraction from reality”. Among the challenges of teaching the economic sciences in Georgian universities is the issue of the “Course of Economic History”. From the higher education programs of the economy, the course of “history of economics” has been taken out, which in turn negatively affects the qualifications of the graduates of the economic program and the quality of knowledge. The Scientific study of economic processes cannot be done without consensual knowledge of traditional traditions and cultural-historical existence and genetic-historical analysis. Also, in the era of globalization and information technology development, new challenges emerged in the challenges of teaching economic science. It is important to introduce interdisciplinary approaches and methods of teaching. In the context of the information period, it is important to modernize economic programs in the form of graduates, who will be able to engage in e-governance, which should provide citizens with the use of new technologies in their decision-making process. In addition, the development of this direction will facilitate acceleration of processes of electronic democracy and make governance processes transparent. It is desirable to modernize educational programs through such training courses as “reengineering business processes for e-governance”, “geographical information systems for territorial governance”, “e-governance solutions support systems”, etc.

A multi-attribute fusion approach extending Dempster–Shafer theory for combinatorial-type evidences

Human cognition of the world generally begins with attribute perception of things. Knowledge element, which is able to reveal microscopic regularities by attribute network, provides an intelligent support for attribute-based cognition. In the field of emergency management, knowledge element has been widely used in evolution rules, risk analysis and machine learning based on emergency cases. However, since the knowledge of emergency management is multidisciplinary and in addition, limited by diverse cognitive perspectives and language expressions, integrating heterogeneous knowledge from domain experts and data sources for depth mining and decision support seems to be difficult. Especially, with the advent of big data, the problem of developing an efficient multi-attribute fusion method to reorganize complex and massive data in a consensual knowledge framework must be addressed. In this paper, a novel mathematical approach, which extends Dempster–Shafer theory to fuse combinatorial-type evidences, is elaborated to handle multi-attribute integration through the use of knowledge element model. This methodology makes it possible to establish a complete knowledge structure for attribute description of things by implementing new uncertainty measures to determine a degree of belief when combining evidences. It is meaningful to optimize the fusion algorithm in view of reliability and expansibility to some extent. Furthermore, the processing also has the advantage of being effective without any semantic preprocessing. The application of the proposed model is shown in marine disaster monitoring for emergency management. We make an empirical analysis in the attribute fusion of knowledge element “sea”.

Which information on women's issues in epilepsy does a community pharmacist need to know? A Delphi consensus study

ObjectiveThe aim of this study was to develop and achieve consensus on a core list of important knowledge items that community pharmacists should know on women's issues in epilepsy. MethodsThis was a consensual study using a modified Delphi technique. Knowledge items were collected from the literature and from nine key contacts who were interviewed on their views on what information community pharmacists should have on women's issues in epilepsy. More knowledge items were suggested by five researchers with interest in women's issues who were contacted to rate and comment on the knowledge items collected. Two iterative Delphi rounds were conducted among a panel of pharmacists (n=30) to achieve consensus on the knowledge items to be included in the core list. Ten panelists ranked the knowledge items by their importance using the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP). ResultsConsensus was achieved to include 68 knowledge under 13 categories in the final core list. Items ranked by their importance were related to the following: teratogenicity (10.3%), effect of pregnancy on epilepsy (7.4%), preconception counseling (10.3%), bone health (5.9%), catamenial epilepsy (7.4%), menopause and hormonal replacement therapy (2.9%), contraception (14.7%), menstrual disorders and infertility (8.8%), eclampsia (2.9%), breastfeeding (4.4%), folic acid and vitamin K (5.9%), counseling on general issues (14.7%), and sexuality (4.4%). ConclusionUsing consensual knowledge lists might promote congruence in educating and/or training community pharmacists on women's issues in epilepsy. Future studies are needed to investigate if such lists can improve health services provided to women with epilepsy (WWE).

Ontology-based modeling and querying of trajectory data

With the evolution of location-sensing devices and associated technologies, mobility data driven scientific discovery approaches became an important paradigm for advanced computing performed in various central areas i.e., Internet of things and social networks. Under this paradigm, trajectory data is considered as a core revealing details of instantaneous behaviors piloted by mobile entities. This forms the need of modeling of such behaviors and the understanding of them, and actually, gave rise to different modeling approaches using either conceptual modeling or ontologies. Modeling and querying of trajectory data are still challenging because of their structural and semantic heterogeneities, and due to the complexity of establishing choices about the domain’ consensual knowledge. Ontologies are promising solutions for the above two problems seeing that they are intended to reduce structural heterogeneity among sources and to specify the semantics of concepts in an unambiguous way. In this paper, we propose a framework for a semantics oriented modeling and querying of trajectory data. We present an ontology-based trajectory pivot model that covers common structures encountered in trajectories associated with links to application and geographic modules. We validate our proposal through a case study dealing with human movement activity.

Género y construcción científica del conocimiento

El propósito de este trabajo es realizar una introducción sobre las principales aportaciones del feminismo a la construcción científica del conocimiento, observando cómo son necesarios no tanto métodos, como fuertes posicionamientos epistemológicos capaces de de-construir planteamientos positivistas, para co-construir una ciencia que supere los falsos objetivismos androcéntricos en aras de conocimientos contextualizados, inclusivos y consensuados intersubjetivamente, que sirvan de motor de cambio y transformación de las relaciones patriarcales de poder. La llegada de las mujeres a la Universidad supuso una revolución científica al incorporar su nuevo punto de vista, capaz de detectar los sesgos misóginos que las mantuvieron al margen de la historia categorizándolas como inferiores. A partir de ahí se ha producido una verdadera rebelión en las epistemologías académicas -las feministas del punto de vista, los feminismos negros, las feministas postmodernas y las empíricas contextuales- no tanto por el uso de determinadas metodologías, como por la fuerza de sus valores democráticos e igualitarios compartidos.
 

Introduction: models, images and representations

This text provides an overview of the articles published in this issue. The notions of image and/or model are central for all their arguments; and all recognize that these notions are both polysemic and vague, because they reflect a multiplicity of meanings, interests and contexts, and serve for transmitting meaning between different contexts. The articles fall into two groups. Those in the first group share an emphasis on images as amplifiers of our capacities of representation, perception, calculation, evocation, synthesis, structuration, and making links between different conceptual territories. Those in the second group share a view of scientific knowledge that emphasizes the function of models in legitimated and consensual knowledge

The influential role of consensual knowledge in international environmental agreements: negotiating the implementing measures of the Mediterranean Land-Based Sources Protocol (1980)

The generation of consensual scientific knowledge significantly influences the development, evolution and outcome of international environmental negotiations. The impact of consensual science on global environmental policy-making is determined, inter alia, by a number of multidimensional factors. Some of these factors are closely associated with the nature and content of the usable scientific knowledge base. This article introduces the concept of gradated scientific validity and demonstrates how different types and aspects of consensual scientific information affect variously the negotiation process of international environmental agreements. Drawing on the negotiation of the Protocol for the Protection of the Mediterranean against Pollution from Land-Based Sources (1980), it shows that the thorough examination and in-depth analysis of the content and basic characteristics of the available scientific knowledge play a pivotal role in the elaboration and formulation of effective implementing measures of an environmental agreement. It is argued that the prominence of consensual science and subsequently its influence on environmental negotiations are substantially determined by the dynamic role of two interrelated variables of gradated scientific validity: the high or low degree of consensus in relation to the significance and value of the provided scientific information (degree of consensus), and the expanding or narrow scientific consensus on distinct underlying aspects of a negotiating problem, including its causes, extent and consequences (content of consensus). This article indicates that the extensive analysis of the nature, content and distinct characteristics of a consensual knowledge base lays the groundwork for comprehensively understanding the role of consensual science in the negotiation and implementation of an international environmental agreement.

Competence management in knowledge intensive organizations using consensual knowledge and ontologies

This article describes an architecture suitable for use in a competence management system for knowledge intensive organizations (KIOs). The underlying motivation for this work is to explore the pra...

Personal reflections on natural history as common ground for interdisciplinary multispecies socio‐ecological research

Interdisciplinary research between social and environmental sciences can meet difficulties when attempting to combine qualitative and quantitative field methods. Natural history, largely sidelined from professional science, may have value as a practice with elements common to the social and environmental sciences. In this commentary, I reflect on my own natural history knowledge and practice related to my primary research habitat in central Chile, and how natural history has helped me to generate interdisciplinary approaches. I propose that three key elements of natural history practice in an interdisciplinary context are observation, interpretation, and the human context of engagement with nature. Natural history practice can help to build consensual knowledge and trust within interdisciplinary teams. It can also generate novel research directions through a return to direct engagement with nature.

La Portée pratique de la phénoménologie: normativité, critique sociale et psychopathologie

Métier — an occupation performed with skill or talent, from the Latin ministerium [service] — retains from its etymology a dignity of ritual worship. This word is the last one in this book, used by the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Christophe Dejours in an interview with Benoît Kanabus to describe what matters most in his clinic of psychotic patients: ‘Ce n'est pas une interprétation. Ce n'est pas de l'empathie. C'est une capacité à palper l'état de la subjectivité du patient […]. Et ça, c'est un métier’ (p. 283). The patient's life often depends on the psychiatrist's capacity to ‘feel’ the former's subjective state before daring to intervene. When this capacity lacks, we have what Gábor Tverdota, following Ludwig Binswanger, calls the ‘émergence du phénomène de l'étranger’ (p. 215). The stranger arises, in psychiatric diagnostic reduction as well as in racism, from an arbitrary limit set on the understanding beyond which a senseless natural causality and moral evil are projected. Against this refusal to understand the Other, which is a defence mechanism, daseinanalysis assumes a normativity of pathology, analogous to the Kunstwollen, or artistic will, in a work of art. It is only through an effort to make sense of this other normativity that a therapeutic relation can be established. Without such an effort, the ‘hiatus social dans la communication’ (p. 215) mirroring the failure in translation that in Dejours's theory gives rise to an amential unconscious, maintains the vicious cycle of pathology. The amential unconscious, according to Dejours, is not the product of repression but of a child's incapacity to symbolize seduction or violence, resulting in the psychic ‘amputation’ of parts of its body. Born of the volatility of asymmetrical power relations, this unconscious manifests itself as pure violence or as an unbearable sensation of loss of ground. The concept of an amential unconscious might help us explain how the existence of excluded parts of the social body periodically sets off psychotic crises. In his consideration of political mobilization, Fabio Bruschi argues with reference to Merleau-Ponty that the more a subject experiences the contingency and fragility of existence, the more he or she may feel compelled to modify the ideology that sustains it. However, if these experiences produce an amential unconscious, we might argue that they will trigger psychotic outbreaks against the common rather than political action. On the other hand, we could think of Dejours's ‘repressed’ (and thus not amential) unconscious as the symbolic matrices resulting from what Merleau-Ponty theorized as the institution: durable, sense-giving, anonymous structures; or as the impersonal consensual knowledge crystallized, according to Karl Mannheim, in ‘la sagesse populaire, mythes, coutumes, adages’ (p. 225), which stabilize the volatility of the social. If the métier of the phenomenologist is to conceive of a transformative dialectic for the institution and for reclaiming the excluded parts of the social body through collective dreams, then this anthology is definitely a step in the right direction.

An Ontological Framework to Preserve Malay Indigenous Health Knowledge

1 1Faculty of Computer and Mathematical Sciences, Universiti Teknologi MARA, 40450 Shah Alam, Selangor, Malaysia In the society, science and technology are intimately linked to the studies and expansion in the general progression of the society. However, the Indigenous Knowledge (IK) which holds the same weight-age as the development of the society with science seems to be forgotten. IK is a knowledge that being used by the people in certain environments in making their living such as health, spiritual and agriculture. It is important because if the knowledge is not being preserved, the extinction will be faced with this valuable knowledge. Ontology intends to capture consensual knowledge in a nonspecific way which in can be reused and shared among the software applications and by the group of people. There is no specific way to preserve the knowledge itself but an appropriate search and retrieval mechanism such as an ontological model is important and needed to describe the concept of the Indigenous Knowledge which is scattered and unorganized. The scope of the Indigenous Knowledge in this paper is within on the Malay culture in Malaysia. The focus is on the Malay confinement dietary. This research targeted towards a better insight of the Indigenous Health Knowledge in Malay culture and society which focus on the Malay postpartum dietary. The ontological framework is divided into four main classes which is the food pyramid levels, allowed and not allowed food, nutrients lack, and preventive and permissive reasons. The classes will be linked to each other to see which foods are allowed or disallowed based on their permissive and preventive reasons. Besides that, the allowed food also will be relates to the food pyramid levels and the nutrients lack in the mother‟s body in the postpartum period. By preserving this kind of knowledge, it is not only able to value but preserve their knowledge for future generation use.

Comparative typological study of change in global environmental regimes

Many global environmental agreements have shown diverse changes in their long-term implementation. Comparative studies on international regimes are limited, and research on change in such regimes is not well developed. A comparative typological study of change in global environmental regimes is presented in this paper. Ernst B. Haas’s “three models of change” is chosen as a framework to explain change in the regimes. The models are (1) incremental growth, (2) turbulent nongrowth, and (3) managed interdependence. They reflect the shift of power balance among member states and their knowledge of policies. The models are applied to five case studies covering the Ramsar, CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna), Basel, Ozone, and Climate regimes, which have been in effect for over 15 years. The three models help explain diverse changes in those regimes. Five factors, (1) shift of power balance and political leadership, (2) the scope of the regime (narrow or wide), (3) institutional legacy, (4) consensual knowledge and conflict of political value, and (5) learning between rival groups, have made major contribution to the change in those regimes.