Corshu

Corshu (CO-cReation of SHared Understanding on climate and air pollution policies) is an application to be sent to the strategic research council of the Academy of Finland on 11th Jan, 2017. It is based on ideas of open assessment, open policy practice, shared understanding and its implementation method, co-creation, and ontological approach to organising self-organised contributions into scientifically valid content. The research plan is an advanced version of what was applied with application Parsha from the Academy in September 2016.

Key links:

• Parsha: A previous application that is a basis for this application.
• Strategic research call December 2016. [1] fi en
• op_fi:Yhtäköyttä-hankkeen loppuraportti (a larger description of the method for decision support)

Abstract

Open data and practices are becoming common in the society. This trend has also brought problems: new internet tools enable to distribute also malevolent information and to distort policy making such as about climate change. Scientific policy support practices are not well equipped to tackle this challenge.

Shared understanding is a situation, where important issues, disagreements, valuations and reasonings are systematically documented and available for decision makers. It is hypothesized as an important method to bring science into policy and attenuate disinformation and outrage. The main objective of Corshu is to test and implement methods and technologies for producing shared understanding on pressing environmental and health issues and other policy-relevant problems.

Shared understanding will be produced in several policy-relevant, controversial situations, starting with climate change policies in Helsinki and disease burden disputes about air pollution. New topics will be chosen for the latter part of the project based on future needs. The methods to be used are based on open assessment and open policy practice, which have been developed and successfully used by THL. The focus will additionally be on systematically describing and analysing values and statements not necessarily based on science and organising these into a new ontological structure to be developed in the project.

Parsha is based on i) a social innovation of hearing every viewpoint systematically without consensus requirement; ii) an information science innovation of a structured synthesis and ontology for documenting, analyzing, synthesizing and disseminating political discourse; and iii) a technological innovation of an interface and RDF database to facilitate participation, knowledge retrieval, learning, and policy support. Our hypothesis is that scientific knowledge prevails in this process.

Parsha will extensively use participation and co-creation in its studies and actively share its results. It will use experiments to test performance of the innovations: whether they actually can collect, synthesise and describe information from participants to their satisfaction; whether the synthesis is informative and correctly interpreted by others; whether the disputes can be identified and their impact described; and whether such analyses actually help policy makers avoid emotional, fast thinking. If they do, many complex environmental and health problems may come closer to a solution.

Ontologies

Ontologies are systematic languages used to describe topics in a standardised way. In this project, we will specifically use web ontology language (OWL 2) and resource description framework (RDF) databases to support the content described in the the OWL language. Here are some links to descriptions of the methods.

• en:Web Ontology Language a general description on Wikipedia. On W3C website: Overview, Primer (syntax and examples, Quick reference guide, Direct semantics (expressed as logical clauses),
• SPARQL language in R,
• Open policy practice ontology described in WebProtégé
• [2] "has as part" in Wikidata --# : Check what can be found from OWL and RDFS and what needs to be specified in the specific ontology. --Jouni (talk) 15:07, 5 December 2016 (UTC)
• Eero Hyvönen, ontology professor [3]