Environmental Policy and Science Management: Using a Scientometric-specific GIS for E-learning Purposes

Who is the "good scientist" in rural-environmental policy? This is not so self-evident as in the case of private high-tech industry. Developing e-learning system in environmental science management is a challenging task in the area of forest and general rural development policy. Who determines the most "important" scientific information and who controls it? There are algorithms for measuring centrality in information networks. The concepts of closeness and betweenness centrality are used as basic metadata for categorizing the communication type in the rural-environmental policy networks. This paper discusses the development of a GIS-based model which includes region-based scientometrics, regarding policy field communication

E-Learning & Environmental Policy: The case of a politico-administrative GIS

Is an effective knowledge exchange and cooperation between academic community and practitioners possible? Implementation of e-learning in specialized policy fields pertains to the most challenging priorities of ICTs and software engineering. In multidisciplinary academic areas which combine environmental policy studies with positivist subjects (like environmental issues, forest policy, rural development, Landscape Architecture etc), the using of e-learning system in analyzing policy issues steadily gains in importance and is a method which connects the academic community and the researchers with the practitioners and field experts. Such initiatives incorporate a number of politometrics- relevant algorithms embedded in a context of political geography (i.e. visualized hierarchies in different regionrelated policy issues). This is the case addressed in this paper. The GIS learning management system introduced in this paper is based on certain criteria concerning organizational models and region-specific politico-administrative hierarchies. Scenarios of politico-administrative metadata achieving optimal power synergy are extracted through a sequencing technique, combining vector-algebra software and statistics and can be used for both teaching and research purposes

Network Analysis Functionality in Environmental Policy: Combining Abstract Software Engineering with Field Empiricism

An empirical application of abstract network analysis software is presented in this paper. Environmental policy networks are used as a case study. The visualization of the real network hierarchy and activity (formal and informal) is feasible only by using special software. A system of "actors"(e.g. public institutions, interest groups, enterprises) interacting with each other and dealing with a particular environmental issue constitutes a policy network, which influences the environmental policy functionality. The impacts of policy content ambiguity on network characteristics have been analyzed by using network analysis software as an example of combining algorithms with empiricism. Recommendations are made to software engineers about possible combination of algorithms with statistics and enrichment of the network analysis software with more visual analytic functions. Stronger familiarization of software engineers with policy analysis discourse and of policy analysts with positivism becomes more imperative for this purpose. On the basis of the quantitative results, environmental policy-makers are advised to invest more in trust development than in pressure and to instrumentalize more scientific information under conditions of ambiguity