Planning in Knowledge Intensive Contexts: Systems Supporting Memory Tracing

In the spatial planning domain decision-making processes are carried out in knowledge intensive environments and aim at developing spatial plans as sort of future scenarios containing strategic prescriptions. These scenarios evolve along the decision making process and together with the emerging and evolving cognitive context. Consequently, tracking the assumptions, values, experiences, conversations, and decisions as they evolve along time, is relevant for decision making and enables better informed reflection for the plan development. In order to take into account the temporal dimension of knowledge in plan generation, and not only in the plan itself, we designed MESS, a MEmory Support System able to sustain a dynamic representation of the memory of the organizational field of intervention. In this paper we discuss the theoretical environment we referred while designing MESS and describe the system architecture.