A Quantitative Approach to Identify the Arguments that Support Decisions in E-Cognocracy

E-cognocracy (Moreno-JimA©nez, 2003, 2004, 2006; Moreno-JimA©nez & Polasek, 2003, 2005) is a new democratic system that adjusts traditional or representative democracy to meet the needs and challenges of the Knowledge Society. If e-democracy is understood as the government of the people by means of information and communication technology (ICT), e-cognocracy is the government of knowledge and wisdom by means of ICT. This “social wisdom†is created in a cognitive constructivist way through the network by all citizens interested in the resolution of the considered problem (GarcA­a Lizana & Moreno-JimA©nez, 2008). To extract and share the knowledge associated with the scientific resolution of public decision-making problems, e-cognocracy must identify the arguments that support decisions by analyzing the messages and comments provided by the actors involved in the decision-making process through the collaborative tools used in the discussion phase. Therefore, this paper presents different decisional tools based on the quantitative values corresponding to the decision makers’ preferences, which are oriented to the identification of the outstanding comments. The arguments supporting the decisions made by the different actors are obtained, in a further step, from these comments by using text-mining techniques.