Open government takes time. The value of learning in the data disclosure pathway of a Municipal organisation

Developing from the work done for the master thesis (1994), the research activity has initially been developed on the application of knowledge representation methods and techniques for decision support in land use planning. Activities have been initially directed towards the problem of representation of those cognitive elements resulting from the imprecise human perception and from the limited computational capabilities of human reasoning (application of fuzzy models in knowledge-based systems prototyping: one year – 1995 – research stage at the Department of Operations Research at the University of Aachen, Germany). Later, the research activity orientation has been twofold: 1) integrating the knowledge representation models with methodological tools derived from the domain of decision theory (research work carried out during the PhD studentship including the research stage –early months of 1998 – at the international research center IIASA in Laxenburg, Austria) and in general 2) interfacing with organizational and cognitive studies. The opportunity to refer to more structured scientific domains, such as those just described, has arisen in consequence of the need to integrate different types of knowledge when capturing and representing that one driving decision-making in spatial planning processes. To do this, in fact, the research work has been also focused on methods and techniques for knowledge acquisition in informal and poorly structured organizational environments (see the coordination of so-called urban participatory laboratories, as well as the planning experiences carried out in urban participatory environments). The relevance of the learning processes observed in the spatial planning decision-making environments, has successively further driven the search activity towards: 1) methods and tools able to facilitate and support the production of actionoriented knowledge (research stage -2001 – in the InterNeg Research Centre at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada) and 2) the exploration of opportunities for the representation of the cognitive dynamics that take place in collaborative planning processes in order to capture the causal links explaining the planning action.