Publication Date:
2004
Description:
The field of impact assessment is becoming increasingly important in a wide
variety of applied disciplines. Some of the examples discussed in this book include air
and noise pollution, terrestrial ecology, landscape, socio-economic impacts, traffic,
hydrogeology and coastal waters. The authors come from the School of Planning at Oxford
Brookes University. The book grew out of a project to evaluate the pros and cons of
using expert systems (ES) and geographic information systems (GIS) to a task that had
traditionally been carried out by experts without the benefit of GIS. The book caught my
eye, because of my own interest in applying ES and GIS to mineral resource assessment.
The accepted wisdom is that expert systems are useful and applicable in situations where
a task can be carried out by an expert in a matter of a few hours. The task must be well
defined, with well-established procedures for its solution. There should be agreement
among experts on how the problem should be solved. The solution should not be based on
"common sense", because this generally implies that the problem is too broad and diffuse
to be encoded with rules. Although impact assessments have been around for some time,
particularly in North America, it is a relatively new process and the definition and
codification of assessments has not reached a generally accepted state. Furthermore, ...
Keywords:
Textbook of informatics
;
Textbook of geography
;
GIS
;
Expert systems
;
socio-economic
;
impact
Permalink
