Description of Social-Ecological Systems Framework Based on Ontology Engineering Theory

Abstract

"There are a variety of research methods in the field of commons and collective action. By means of these methods various perspectives towards a particular field is provided, but it is difficult to share these perspectives among researchers in different domains smoothly. In addition, it is also difficult for a practitioner to distinguish a difference between the perspectives that researchers have. The social-ecological systems (SESs) framework supports sharing the perspectives by providing the common items. However, in order to facilitate collaboration certainly the method to share mutual difference between perspectives more explicitly is necessary. Ontology engineering, which is one of the base technologies in semantic Web technology, is a method to design some sort of guideline facilitating knowledge-sharing. It enables us to share a mutual difference between perspectives through explicating a definition of a concept. Therefore, this time we aim at describing the framework of SESs by means of an ontology. For this purpose, we first define the concepts reflected by the items in the SESs framework and incorporate these into the ontology dealing with sustainability science. Second, we discuss a variety of semantic relationships between the items in the SESs framework by means of the constructed SS-SESs ontology. Finally, we apply the SS-SES ontology to the particular targets such as water resource management or local community resilience, and discuss how we actually use the SS-SESs ontology in the context of environmental planning and management."