Modeling Knowledge in Environmental Analysis: A New Approach to Soundscape Ecology

Abstract

Planning activities are inherently technical, political and organizational exercises, being both constructions of action optimization over time and "social" organizations promoting action. Thus, they require organization and consensus. In this context, the concept of processes that develop based on diffused interactions between different agents appears useful and rather effective. Cognitive agents and reactive agents coexist in a system of relations and interactions. This allows the context in which environmental management and/or planning processes take place to be modeled in its essential parts. Scholars and researchers have often wondered if behavioral proxies of the environment-agent can be singled out for possible inclusion in a multi-agent system (MAS) layout. This challenge is of particular interest today, considering the potential offered by the spread of intelligent sensor networks, able to represent and model various "behaviors" of the environment-agent. Today's growing interest in research in the field of planning is enhanced by an awareness of the complexity issue embedded in planning. In this framework, this paper is realized as a pilot study on the knowledge of sound and soundscapes as elements characterizing the environment-agent in the context of environmental planning processes. The study reflects a contextual difficulty of collecting extensive data in uneasy conditions: nevertheless it reports results and suggestions useful in an innovative MAS-oriented perspective.

Semantic Crowdsourcing of Soundscapes Heritage: A Mojo Model for Data-Driven Storytelling

“…Social media soundscape information can serve for the prediction of health effects of noise pollution in different areas [38]. In this context, cooperative smart-sensing and crowdsourcing practices have been proposed and launched to raise public awareness toward soundscape conservation, safeguarding, and overall ecological consciousness through multimodal mapping capabilities [39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46].…”

“…The impact of the anticipated services is also strongly connected to featured projects, which have been deployed to discover and recreate sounds of the past, emanating from the perspectives of acoustic heritage, archaeo-acoustics, and historical acoustics. Such works, supported by limited historical/acoustic data, rely mainly on computational models and simulation outcomes to offer an intangible CH experience, projecting relationships between people and sound over time [46,[68][69][70][71][72]. In this direction, we can forestall the dense impact of the proposed MoJo-adapted system, which can document today's soundscapes to be experienced as tomorrow's heritage, taking advantage of semantically enhanced data-driven storytelling.…”