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talk · Tuesday 22 September · 15:00–⁠15:15 · ODIN

The Triple A Principle: actionability, applicability and auditability for actionable biodiversity knowledge

Lars Vogt · Semantic Interoperability and Standards Infrastructure

Recording time 6:20:27–6:33:45Open on Vimeo ↗

Summaries and key moments are machine-produced. Check the recording for the speaker’s exact words.

The short versionActionable biodiversity knowledge needs procedural content with explicit applicability conditions and evidence, not just FAIR metadata.

Overview

What this was about

Lars Vogt argues that FAIR data and machine-actionability are insufficient for actionable knowledge in interventions such as restoring a degraded mangrove site. He proposes three nested criteria - actionability (procedural knowledge of what to do), applicability (explicit context conditions under which it works) and auditability (evidence of where it succeeded or failed, feeding back into conditions) - and a representation using the Semantic Units Framework: action units, applicable action units and audited applicable action units, plus conditional action units with question and directive units that turn a knowledge graph into a context-sensitive decision support system. The framework is conceptual, with a preprint on arXiv.

Why it matters. It pushes knowledge-graph design beyond describing what is the case toward supporting decisions and interventions such as ecosystem restoration.

Key ideas

In the room

  • Many "FAIR" datasets have FAIR containers (metadata) but not FAIR content.
  • Machine-actionability usually means data transformation; human actionability includes epistemic and intervention operations.
  • Actionability: procedural knowledge (directives, steps toward a goal) is largely absent from FAIR infrastructures.
  • Applicability: actionability does not equal applicability due to context dependencies; explicit applicability conditions are needed.
  • Auditability: applicability reports feed back to refine conditions (e.g. salinity outside documented success range).
  • The three As are nested and proposed as necessary and sufficient for the representational side of actionable knowledge.
  • Semantic units make statements first-class typed, addressable units; action units link input, output, plan and objective units.
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Transcript

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Programme abstract

A³ctionable Understanding: Action units for post-FAIR biodiversity knowledge infrastructures

Lars Vogt

The FAIR Principles have made biodiversity data findable, accessible, and interoperable, but not operationally usable. A critical layer is missing between semantic representation and context-sensitive action, one that distinguishes the structural capacity of a knowledge representation to support operations (actionability) from the epistemic reliability of using it in a specific context (applicability). Conflating these has contributed to well-documented failures in conservation practice.

We introduce Action Units as formal knowledge objects that extend plan specifications within the Semantic Units Framework by making applicability conditions explicit as first-class typed components. Three types correspond to three operation classes: epistemic action units ask ‘What is the case here, and does this knowledge apply?’; transformational action units ask ‘How can available representations be processed into usable form?’; and intervention action units ask ‘What can be done in this situation to achieve a desired outcome?’ Conditional action units, i.e., executable IF-THEN rules linking SPARQL context queries to workflow triggers, enable knowledge graphs to serve as AI-ready decision-support systems.

Applied to biodiversity science, the framework addresses conservation failures and enables practitioners to identify where actionable knowledge is missing. We propose the TripleA Principle-Actionability, Applicability, and Auditability (tracing evidence and failure contexts) -as a post-FAIR guiding framework, and argue that A³ctionable Understanding-Actionability, Applicability, and Action Units-provides the representational foundation next-generation biodiversity knowledge infrastructures require.

This is a conceptual proposal; implementation is deferred to subsequent work.

Submitted to the conference programme before the talk, so the talk itself may differ.