Transparency and Reproducibility in Participatory Systems Modelling: the Case of Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping

By aggregating semi-quantitative mind maps from multiple agents, fuzzy cognitive mapping (FCM) allows developing an integrated, cross-sectoral understanding of complex systems. However, and especially for FCM based on individual interviews, the map-building process presents potential pitfalls. These are mainly related to the different understandings of the interviewees about the FCM semantics as well as the biases of the analyst during the elicitation and treatment of data. This paper introduces a set of good practice measures to increase transparency and reproducibility of map-building processes in order to improve credibility of results from FCM applications. The case study used to illustrate the proposed good practices assesses heatwave impacts and adaptation options in an urban environment. Agents from different urban sectors were interviewed to obtain individual cognitive maps. Using this set of data, we suggest good practices to collect, digitalize, interpret, pre-process and aggregate the individual maps in a traceable and coherent way. © 2018 The Authors Systems Research and Behavioral Science published by International Federation for Systems Research and John Wiley and Sons Ltd. © 2018 The Authors Systems Research and Behavioral Science published by International Federation for Systems Research and John Wiley and Sons LtdThis study is part of the project Bottom-up Climate Adaptation Strategies for a Sustainable Europe (BASE) funded by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under Grant Agreement No. 308337. MO (FPDI-2013-16631 and IJCI-2016-28835) and MBN (RYC-2013-13628) acknowledge co-funding from the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (MINECO)

DarNERcorp: An annotated named entity recognition dataset in the Moroccan dialect

DarNERcorp is a manually annotated named entity recognition (NER) dataset in the Moroccan dialect, also called Darija. The dataset consists of 65,905 tokens and their corresponding tags according to BIO scheme. 13.8% of the tokens are named entities spanning four categories: person, location, organization, and miscellaneous. The data were scraped from the Moroccan Dialect section of Wikipedia and processed and annotated using open-source libraries and tools. The data are useful for the Arabic natural language processing (NLP) community as they address the lack in dialectal Arabic annotated corpora. This dataset can be used to train and evaluate named entity recognition systems in dialectal and mixed Arabic

Integrating fuzzy cognitive maps and multi-agent systems for sustainable agriculture

In conventional agriculture, a wide variety of decisions are made with high uncertainty. Recommendations regarding pesticides, fertilizers, and irrigation water are made in a very generic manner and do not consider the intrafield variability of parameters that can affect crop yields. This has serious economic and environmental implications. The goal of precision agriculture is to improve agricultural sustainability and to optimize crop growth decisions by accounting for field variability and site-specific parameter values. The aim of the present work was to build an online smart platform based on innovative technologies such as multi-agent processing and fuzzy cognitive maps that improves decision-making by farming field-management nodes, which should ultimately save resources at the farm level while increasing the income from farming through the optimal use of both water and fertilizers and respecting the environment and the consumer. The platform helps farmers to access knowledge that can assist them in making the right decisions when implementing precision agriculture management actions (e.g., matching the application of nitrogen to crop demands, predicting key growth stages, and estimating the optimal duration of irrigation). © 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG

Design and Implementation of an Environmental Decision Support System: tools, attributes and challenges

This paper presents the approach and findings related to the implementation of an Environmental Decision Support System (EDSS), designed to assist the Moroccan national decision makers, in particular, in their evaluation of the state of the environment, and in their approach to sustainable development and environmental policymaking. We describe the background of the environmental situation in Morocco and the need that drives the development of an EDSS. The EDSS offers a number of salient features and attributes that help with framing the decision making process, ranging from the management and monitoring of indicators, modelling of environmental problems using a knowledge-based approach, uncertainty handling using fuzzy logic, dissemination of information with the society, as well as stakeholder involvement. The description of these features is linked to the main system components and tools. We also discuss some of the major challenges we faced during the different project phases in spite of the recognized importance of the EDSS for environmental management and evaluation at the highest levels. We discuss the perhaps most problematic set of challenges, namely elicitation of the requirements, scarcity of data and knowledge, and failure to define clear criteria to frame the selection of relevant indicators.http://enviroinfo.eu/sites/default/files/pdfs/vol8514/0629.pd

Design and Implementation of an Environmental Decision Support System: tools, attributes and challenges

Abstract This paper presents the approach and findings related to the implementation of an Environmental Decision Support System (EDSS), designed to assist the Moroccan national decision makers, in particular, in their evaluation of the state of the environment, and in their approach to sustainable development and environmental policymaking. We describe the background of the environmental situation in Morocco and the need that drives the development of an EDSS. The EDSS offers a number of salient features and attributes that help with framing the decision making process, ranging from the management and monitoring of indicators, modelling of environmental problems using a knowledge-based approach, uncertainty handling using fuzzy logic, dissemination of information with the society, as well as stakeholder involvement. The description of these features is linked to the main system components and tools. We also discuss some of the major challenges we faced during the different project phases in spite of the recognized importance of the EDSS for environmental management and evaluation at the highest levels. We discuss the perhaps most problematic set of challenges, namely elicitation of the requirements, scarcity of data and knowledge, and failure to define clear criteria to frame the selection of relevant indicators