Methodology

I am interested in innovative approaches based on activity theory that promote participatory design while being an actor rather than a spectator.

For building e-services, I want to draw attention on the importance of co-design and co-learning between producers, editors and users:

• • First, it is important to understand the psycho-logical desires and motivations of experts who are the producers of knowledge. Their wishes are based on their personal objective and vision. For example, specialists who are going on retirement have accumulated a lot of experience and information in their domain and they wish to "transmit" it to their community. If it is not stored, it will be lost.

  • Second, we have to define together who are the end-users of the final product-service, i.e. the produced knowledge base. Are the receivers of applications other experts, managers, curators, technicians, educators, students or final public? The choice determines the level of specialization of the decision help tool, i.e. focused on Research, Management, or Pedagogy (RMP). For example in natural sciences, classification is a research topic that interests specialists although identification is more oriented on the education of a larger public, i.e. amateurs who want to learn the domain. Between them, there are the managers and technicians who need to monitor the biodiversity of natural protected areas. The desires of target users have also to be taken into account because a product-service which is not longed for is a dead end.

  • Thirdly, these different objectives must be in accordance with the skills of producers (their know-how) and their will to build such a product-service. The vision of designers (producers and editors) conditions the trust of the stakeholders and receivers, because it determines the level of complexity of the tools (applications) to be mastered in order that they become real instruments in end-users' hands, i.e. really used. For example in instrumental music, the objective is only pedagogical, because the aim is to play of an instrument as well as the professor. This leads to instantiate the concept of knowledge base as an instrumental e-learning product-service for showing know hows to learners.

So, the next step after defining the above objectives is to make the plan for building the appropriate tool that can be mastered by the targeted users.

In natural sciences:

• • On the design process, knowledge bases are the result of different sequential activities: knowledge acquisition, knowledge processing and knowledge validation. This building process of a product-service is not linear. It is iterative between business objects (supply) and use objects (demand), thus embracing a constructivism approach. The core of my research is tied to this cyclical approach focused on improving robustness of observation, interpretation and description for classification and identification activities that make sense in the community of practice.

  • On the appropriation process, our approach of robustness for systems that help to describe, classify and identify biological objects is based on the application of the scientific method of K. R. Popper in biology (experimenting and testing), in order to help naturalists to understand their domain better, test their opinions, and transmit their knowledge. We have built user-friendly computer tools to allow the construction of structured and pre-classified descriptions (the examples), to learn inductive hypothesis (classifications), and test them with new observations (by identification).

The quality of descriptions is fundamental for the learning process. Besides, they must be comparable, and so rely on a descriptive model that the expert must explicitly represent and structure. To help him, we have stressed some observational mechanisms from monographs published in scientific literature. A paper on the representation of observational data used for classification and identification of natural objects explains the needs for helping systematicians in more details.