Date: 2009.09.04
Participants: vh, sn, ro, yp
Protocol written by: sn
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At the time of finalizing this text we are on a good way to reach most of the goals suggested in the project plan: A in depth literature research was done by all members of the group and a summary of the topics discussed in these papers is in the process of being finalized. While we initially concentrated on the historical background of the different TK systems (where such information could be found), now there is also a lot of technical information included in the literature reviews.
Furthermore the website has been enhanced, and a “wiki” collaboration was started on the ILIAS platform of the FH Cologne.
We also made further progress on the proposed practical experiments, but at least in the case of the Spirulina experiment, results are negative (see experiments part of this text). The work on the other proposed experiments still continues however.
Due to the lack of progress in the original plan to create a building concept consisting of our individual TK systems and general concerns regarding the overall focus of our semester-project (see lessons learned), we started a comprehensive re-evaluation of the main objectives.
At this point a rough re-orientation has been completed and it’s general outline is already presented in this text. In addition a brainstorm concerning a DSS (see methods) has been done, and we expect to have at least a simple outline of the needed concepts soon.
General overview
Decision support systems are (usually) computerized information systems to support decision making. According to Langefors (1973) an information system is a technological system to store data and draw conclusions from this data. DDS have evolved from research on organized decision making and on interactive computer systems conducted in the 1960s (Keen, 1978) and have become a standard tool for many organisations from the 1980s onwards.
They can be classified as "active", "passive" and "cooperative" systems: An "active" DSS is a system that aids decision making and recommends certain solutions. A "passive" DSS on the other hand does only support the decision finding process. Last but not least a "cooperative" DSS allows the system operator to interactively modify data in the system to evaluate different solutions (Haettenschwiler, 1999).
Examples for the use of DSS are manifold. Most intensively it is probably used in business management, but other uses include the decision support for medical doctors or engenieers. For each of these uses one can usually find commercial software applications and recently also a growing number of open-source alternatives. Overall one can say that DSS benefit the user in decision efficiency and might also lead to new ways of thinking about a certain solution. It can also give support in difficult multi-criteria decisions and provides a systematic approach to quality control in decision making.
Implementation plan
To create our own simple DSS to aid decision makers in the use of TK, we plan to create a small web-based set of questions and evaluation tools to integrate into our TK website. Furthermore we plan to investigate if a already existing software like “Dicodess” could be supplied with a dataset of TK related concepts.
(updated 24.09.2009) We finally redefined the objectives for our project in the course of the research for a sound definition of Traditional Knowledge. These new objectives are based on the final Problem statement and Hypothesis and displace our initial objectives more or less completely.
Objective
Review and critically asses the use of TK in development cooperation. Investigate means to improve this usage.
Sub-Objectives
The new version of our definition of Traditional Knowledge is online by now. Check the new version under
http://tk.noblogs.org/post/2009/08/08/definition-of-traditional-knowledge-new-version
and the old outdated version under
http://tk.noblogs.org/post/2009/05/03/our-definition-of-traditional-knowledge