Section: Application Domains

e-participation in Environment and Health

Following the Rio Conference (1992) and the Agenda for the 21st Century, local territories are now directly concerned with the set up of actions for a sustainable development. In this frame, ICT tools have been supposed to be very efficient to re-engage people in the democratic process and to make decision-making more transparent, inclusive and accessible. So, sustainable development is closely associated with citizen participation. The emerging research field of e-democracy (so called Digital Democracy or eParticipation), concerned with the use of communications technologies such as the internet to enhance the democratic processes is now a very active field. Though still in its infancy, a lot of literature is already available (see for instance: http://itc.napier.ac.uk/ITC/publications.asp or http://www.demo-net.org/ for a global view of work in Europe) and numerous different topics are addressed in the field.

Below are some topics where AxIS was or is involved in:

• Preprocessing and analysing collective usage data and social networks from group discussions related to a document: In the Intermed project related to water management, we started to study new services based on synthesizing discussions or on analysing disucssions (cf. section  8.2.2 ) and we pursued this year by elaborating a preprocessing tool based on disucssions data.

• Methods and tools for open innovation: we submitted a proposal for supporting the design of innovative services by citizens from public data in collaboration with Fing (Marseille) and Ademe (Sophia Antipolis) for the Inria Color call for actions.

Main AxIS topics relevant for these domains are: social network analysis, personalization and information retrieval, recommender systems, expert search, design and evaluation of methods and tools for open innovation, usage mining, mining data streams.