00:01Good afternoon.

00:02Should probably start by describing what it is I have...I do and that's basically I design decision support systems and their applications...

00:10...for landscape or environmental analysis and planning.

00:15That's such a mouthful.

00:16It doesn't fit on a business card, so I'm very happy to hear I can probably just call myself a geodesigner now and...

00:26The...oh, I think I went by a slide, sorry.

00:30Okay. First of all, I've been in charge of development of a system for a number of years.

00:34It's call EMDS which stands for Ecosystem Management Decision Support.

00:38And, I'm not really going to go into much of a description of the system, just give you a very general idea about it.

00:43Really the focus of what I'm going to be talking about is kind of the experiences of the...developing it...

00:48...with developing it as they, I think, hopefully relate to geodesign.

00:53It's a general application framework for designing and implementing knowledge-based decision support...

00:58...for environmental analysis and planning.

01:00Again, a mouthful.

01:01And...and it's designed to support any geographic skill.

01:05It integrates GIS, of course, but it also includes knowledge-based reasoning technologies and decision modeling technologies...

01:13...to provide decision support, with the idea of supporting as far as possible the adaptive management process.

01:20Just a little bit more background and then I'll get on to the main points.

01:23It's implemented as an ArcGIS ArcMap extension and for the Arc...for the GIS averse, an ArcEngine stand-alone.

01:30It integrates a logic engine from rules-of-thumb software to perform the landscape environmental val...eval...sorry, evaluations...

01:39...and a decision engine from InfoHarvest to support strategic planning.

01:45So that's as much as I'll say.

01:48Later on, at...at the five o'clock session, I will be out there with a computer if anybody would li...

01:54...like to actually see what this thing actually does.

01:56But these are some comments I thought were pertinent to the...the discussion today.

02:02Some of the experiences are and lessons learned, if you will.

02:07There was some...has been real value in the...a very generic framework design approach to delivering this technology.

02:17It not only supports large complex abstract problems, and I was very happy to hear somebody mention abductive inser...inference earlier.

02:25We use lot...logic engines, particularly because they're very well suited to handling abductive inter...inference problems.

02:32And in particular, wh...these kinds of models accommodate a very diverse array of topics.

02:38They're only constrained by, can you describe in logical terms what it is you're trying to evaluate.

02:46Some of the more important lessons learned along the way have been the importance of transparency.

02:51Decision support is more than providing just pretty maps.

02:54The things that have been critical to the success of this technology, at least to date, is that it provides a...a rational...

03:00...repeatable and full...fully documentable process that is necessary to support planning in an effective way.

03:07And perhaps most importantly, transparency.

03:11These kinds of technologies offer a way to provide very intuitive explanations of model results...

03:17...and the acid test here is that senior-level managers in the federal agencies that I work with...

03:21...can stand in front of Congress and give them an intelligent explanation what the models do that they're using.

03:28That...that's I think has been a significant point.

03:30The other thing has been...I think one thing that was learned along the way, mostly because the system has evolved over time, was...

03:38...as we put it into practice initially, it was designed to do landscape evaluations...

03:42...and we saw people trying to use it for purposes for which it was never intended.

03:47They were trying to both interpret the landscape condition and prioritize things at the same time, and it was a big muddled mess.

03:55One of the things we figured out in...in one of these V8 moments, if you will...

03:58...was that if we added an explicit decision component to complement the logic modeling component...

04:03...all of a sudden we had very sim...very much simpler problems and it was easier for people...

04:08...to conceptualize and implement models with this very simple addition.

04:14The other things that have been significant I think in terms of the success of these kinds of technologies...

04:19...is the ability to provide reasoning in the presence of very incomplete information...

04:24...particularly in...in the context of environmental or landscape analysis where missing data is a perennial and persistent problem.

04:34This is a, I think, a very valuable feature to have built into any kind of decision support system.

04:42And finally, it's a minor point I guess...

04:44...but it's been designed from the beginning with the idea of supporting multiple interdependent spatial scales of analysis.

04:51Some things I just want to conclude with, it's not a matter of boasting, but just to put in perspective...

04:58...it's been a...we...it's been around since 1997 as a production release.

05:03It was originally developed, the first three versions, by Esri under contract with the government.

05:09We're at version 4.1 now.

05:11And what I, rather than give you an extensive explanation of all the kinds of applications...

05:17...I'd refer you to the Wikipedia site that's listed up here.

05:20There you'll find a good breakdown of all...of the applications that give you some idea of the broad array of topics...

05:27...through which this kind of technology's been applied.

05:32Any number of different spatial scales and all over the world.

05:35It's a good indication of what these sort of design criteria have sort of bought along the way.

05:43And then lastly, I just refer you to the...the home page which is...

05:47...EMDS is now under the stewardship of the Redlands Institute...

05:50...which I've been extremely happy about.

05:54It doesn't sit inside the government anymore, but it's a private nonprofit.