Ontology-Based Interaction Design for Social-Ecological Systems Research

Contemporary social-ecological systems (SESs) research that supports policy and decision-making to tackle sustainability issues requires interdisciplinary and often multistakeholder synergy. Various frameworks have been developed to describe and understand SESs, each producing different kinds of data and knowledge. The resultant lack of interoperability spurred our development of an ontologically grounded SESs integrated conceptual model. This paper explores the deployment of that model and describes techniques for ontology-based interaction design to clarify notions, align perspectives, negotiate terminologies and semantics in inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration settings. We offer examples of interaction scripts that utilise ontologies, discursive artefacts, game and play methods, and report on an exploratory workshop playtest which provided preliminary evidence of the potentials for ontology-based participatory sense-making for knowledge co-production.