General Knowledge Representation and Sharing, with Illustrations in Risk/Emergency Management

Many decision-making tasks, including the sustainability-oriented ones and those related to the management of risks or emergencies, must gather, integrate, and analyze an important amount of information of various kinds and origins. Hence, how should information be best organized and shared by agents – people or software – for all and only the pieces of information looked for by these agents to be maximize their retrieval, reuse, organization and analysis by these agents? To that end, various logic-based knowledge representation (KR) and sharing (KS) techniques, and hence KR bases, have been used. However, most KS researchers focus on what this article defines as “restricted KR and KS”, where information providers and consumers can or have to discuss for solving information ambiguities and other problems. The first part of this article highlights the usefulness of “general KR and KS” and, for supporting them, provides a panorama of complementary techniques, and hence, indirectly, best practices or kinds of tools to use for general KS purposes. These techniques collectively answer research questions about how to support Web users in the collaborative building of KR bases. The second part uses the risk/emergency management domain to illustrate the ways different types of information can be represented to support general KS.