A COLLABORATIVE KNOWLEDGE SHARING SYSTEM FOR INTERDISCIPLINARY ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCHES: CASE STUDIES ON THE POLICIES AND POTENTIAL OF RENEWABLE ENERGY IN ASIA-PACIFIC COUNTRIES

This paper presents a collaborative knowledge sharing system called 5D World Map System and its applications in the field of multidisciplinary environmental research and education.

The feature of this 5D World Map System as an educational tool is characterized by the following four aspects: 1) the system has been utilized as a platform to share the research results of joint projects on global environment by researchers in a network of Asia-Pacific and European universities/institutions, 2) the system is also employed for storing, sharing, analyzing and representing the facts that are investigated and obtained during the fieldwork or internship by students in those universities/institutions, 3) the system provides a common framework for students in heterogeneous disciplines such as sociology, policy management, science & technology and ICT, to study some particular topics in a group work by using various kinds of multimedia such as text, image, video, sound, geo-information and statistics, and 4) the system contributes to perform an experience-based learning such as a simulation of international negotiation on climate change by providing basic data for discussions.

Especially, in this paper, by presenting two case studies related to more than 20 Asia-Pacific countries, we demonstrate the feasibility of our analytical visualization and knowledge sharing method with 5D World Map System for the study of hot energy issues.

5D World Map System enables semantic, temporal and spatial analysis of multimedia, integrates and visualizes the analyzed results as a 5-dimentional dynamic historical atlas. The main feature of this system is to create various context-dependent patterns of environmental/historical/cultural stories according to a user’s viewpoint dynamically. This system generates multiple views of semantic and temporal-spatial relationships among multimedia of the cross-cutting issues, and provides high visibility of semantic correlations between multimedia in time series variation with multi-geographical spaces. The objective to create this system is to combine real and cyber spaces to share knowledge not only in technological systems/mechanisms but also social rules/phenomena in the field of environmental research.

For the first case study, we focus on two major renewable energy policies in Asia-Pacific countries: Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) and Feed-In Tariff (FIT), and analyze the effects of RPS and FIT in Asia-Pacific countries and the changes in the share of renewable energy in each country over the last ten years.

For the second case study, we focus on the potential of renewable energy in South-Pacific countries, collect the data from an international organization on food and agriculture, calculate the potential of bioenergy in each country from 2000 to 2011 and map the calculated results onto the time-series world maps to analyze the possibility.

The main contribution of this research is proposing a method to re-create, visualize and objectivize the analyzed results of both engineering and political studies by using a real-time knowledge sharing system with multimedia, spatiotemporal information and global overview.