Experience mining for decision making on implementing sustainable urbanization - An innovative approach

The proliferation of good urbanization practices around the world has led to an imperative need to share these experiences. However, these good practice cases relate to different and specific contexts, making it difficult to effectively apply these experiences to other cases. It is appreciated that no existing method is available to guide us into refining these experiences so that they can be adopted in new urbanization scenarios. This method-shortage presents a major barrier to the sharing of good experiences between cities in promoting sustainable urbanization. This paper presents an Experience Mining System (ExMS) for effectively extracting previous urbanization practice experiences. ExMS is built based on the theories of experience representation, storage and mining. Its major components include a Sustainable Urbanization Practices Database (SUPD), a Refinery process, and a Mine-sweeper. ExMS can facilitate decision-makers in the selection of strategies and solutions when addressing urbanization practice challenges. © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.