Environmental notions representation and description: Towards a redefinition of the relationships between information systems development and individual cognition

Environment is a broad and complex issue. It is likely be inaccessible to most laypersons, whereas, environmental experts are likely to have a limited field of expertise. Hence, there is a need for comprehensive and accurate environmental information in many situations. This research aims at building a tool providing basic scientific terminologies about the environment associated with a graphic and interactive model structured around six levels: Activities - polluting processes – pollutants - types of pollution - potential effects and impacts on humans and ecosystems. We approach this development through the framework provided by the field of knowledge management (KM) and information system (IS). It allows analysing the relative importance of tacit dimension of individual knowledge compared to tangible information sources during the development of IS. It appears that in complex scientific domains like the Environment, physical sources of information and the deterministic approaches of exact sciences remain important. The next steps of our research will investigate the interpretation, the user’s knowledge acquiring process and the willingness to use this tool whose development required many theoretical modelling phases.