Accessing Knowledge, Information and Resources for Planning and Spatial Decision Support: Introducing the Spatial Decision Support Knowledge Portal

To help synthesize and systematically organize the information, knowledge and resources for spatial decision support (SDS), and to help researchers and practitioners engaged in an actual planning process find relevant information and resources for solving their specific planning problems, the SDS Consortium and University of Redlands have developed a conceptual framework for SDS and a collection of SDS resources, hosted on the SDS Knowledge Portal. The conceptual framework includes a set of defined, inter-connected concepts pertaining to planning and spatial decision support, such as planning and decision problem types, application domains, knowledge domains and planning process including phases and steps. This conceptual framework is further used to organize a representative set of SDS resources, such as planning process workflows, methods, tools and models, data sources, case studies, literature, and so forth. The SDS Knowledge Portal facilitates learning of SDS and accessing SDS resources, promotes semantic clarity by adopting a common vocabulary for the user community, and promotes interoperability among SDS resources by using a standard set of concepts to define and classify these resources.