Towards a semantic intelligence to support seaport governance in environmental and ecological sustainability

Abstract

Taking into account that seaport governance in environmental and ecological sustainability becomes a seaport function of growing public interest, environmental and ecological factors are criteria that will enter into operational choices, capital investments, and cargo routing decisions. Environmental influences as well as factors of institutional governance (regulations and environmental management practices) may lead to common interests among the members. We propose the use of a semantic-based approach to further look at how the knowledge needed to understand the effects observed in seaport decision-making tackle the difficulty of sharing information and finding the best possible representations (model) in order to aid collective decision-making process. The benefits of the semantic use of terminology relevant for the port governance are envisaged in which modeling an ontology will require consensus among domain experts from many and different port areas and the complexity of reaching consensus when multiple conflicting views may exist can threaten consistency across the systems.