Knowledge-based approach to planning: A case study-based approach

Abstract

Planning is an anticipatory decision-making process that involves either a risk mitigation or resource allocation problem. Policy developers and enablers are required to interact with resource providers such as civil engineers and water resource engineers and consumers such as agriculturists and farmers in different projects. Such projects can benefit from a knowledge-based approach that uses ideas used in past and other projects based on a hierarchy of concepts and established facts. Domain knowledge extracted from artifacts such as planning documents and data models used in previous projects thus provide useful ontological structures for information sharing and foster evolution of a scientific process in developmental planning. In this paper, we review some knowledge-based paradigms used in spatial planning, identify gaps and redundancies in the current practices, and propose the development of a tool to aid the development and use of ontologies in water resource planning. We hypothesize that such ontologies have a spatial basis and outline a use case-based approach to identify upper-level concepts. The proposed tool and approach are aligned to benefit all stakeholders in the planning process by facilitating information sharing across information communities as well as assimilate knowledge baselines for future projects.