ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the environmental knowledge infrastructures of some case studies and underscore the sociotechnical character of the infrastructures. It discusses the kinds of information the infrastructures acquire from data; the agents and methods involved in information acquisition and transfer of information into knowledge; and the kinds of resulting knowledge. The chapter describes methods and technologies that enable technical subsystems of environmental knowledge infrastructures to more actively support human agents in—or altogether automate—information acquisition and support the curation of machine interpretable knowledge and thus automated knowledge processing. Environmental infrastructures often employ environmental sensor networks to automate data acquisition. Sensors automate monitoring, that is, automatically repeat measurement. A sensor generally monitors one property over time. Acquired data are processed to gain information about the environment, and information is transferred into knowledge. These tasks are typically performed manually by human agents. Environmental knowledge infrastructures are sociotechnical systems consisting of technical and social subsystems.
