By Lin Liu and He Zhang, School of Software, Tsinghua University, Beijing, P. R. China
Excerpt: The Climate Change problem is one of most complicated target of research due to its cross-disciplinary nature, the multi-perspectives of stakeholders with conflicting concerns of interests and the quantity and complexity of the background knowledge required. Thus, to understand the Climate Change problem, one of the most important steps is to have a systematic way to analyze and manage the cross-disciplinary Climate Change knowledge with respect to the key stakeholders’ interest.
Advertisement
3 comments
Comments feed for this article
April 23, 2010 at 2:39 pm
Jorge
The authors rightly point out that the cross-disciplinary, multiple-stakeholder nature of the climate change problem makes it a very complicated research target. Their proposed solution to address this problem is to map out our knowledge of object characteristics and of stakeholder goals, creating goal- and object- models of the world to aid decision making.
It’s an interesting thought, and the part of me that has spent some time doing goal modeling would like to see it through. But I have serious doubts about the short-term applicability of this kind of modeling for one of humankind’s most complex issues. My experience with goal models tells me that they are prone to becoming unmanageable even in relatively simple settings. This problem may be resolved with further research, perhaps, but I don’t think it’ll happen any time soon. So it does not seem to me that this kind of knowledge mapping will make our domains and potential solutions apparent.
I would love to be proved wrong, though, and if there was a well-documented case study of a complex domain whose analysis was simplified by goal- or object- modeling I would really like to explore it in detail. Particularly if the domain was related to climate change. However, at this point, this proposal seems too abstract to me.
April 26, 2010 at 2:42 pm
ioannisathanasiadis
The paper incorporates some nice ideas, and frames appropriately software issues related to climate change applications. While it over-stresses the computational challenges, it underestimates issues related to uncertainty.
I am afraid that moving from an object model to the “Internet of Thinks” for climate change, ecology and environmental data is not something that will not happen easily and the change will not be straight forward. I think that authors are very optimistic with their view. Wish I am wrong.
Finally, user perspectives on climate change problems are presented with a rather superficial example: Even if the various users presented have a different function to optimize, still they agree on the principles of reducing GHG emissions, and that they need to reduce them. However, the climate change community suffers with value conflict issues that have to do the “existence” of phenomena, their “quantification” and their “interpretation”. I am afraid these cannot be treated with the framework presented by the authors.
In overall, while the paper identifies key components of the problems faced today, and the framework presented seems rather out of reality. However, I think that authors have a message to bring alone in the workshop.
April 28, 2010 at 5:54 pm
Ideas for the workshop program « Software Research and Climate Change
[...] (inspired by several papers, including Justyna Zander’s paper on Computation of Things, Lin Liu and colleagues on carbon footprint calculators and climate [...]