Abstract:
Mining industries develop environmental management systems/plans to
mitigate the impact their operations has on the society. Even with these plans, there
are still issues of pollution affecting the society. Though there are ICT-based
pollution monitoring solutions, their use is dismal due to lack of appreciation or
understanding of the disseminated information. This result in mining communities
depending on their own local knowledge to observe, monitor and predict miningrelated
environmental pollution. However, this local knowledge has never been
tested scientifically or analysed to recognize its usability or effectiveness. Mining
companies tend to ignore this knowledge from the communities as it is treated like
common information with no much scientific value. As a step towards verifying or
validating this local knowledge, we demonstrate how fuzzy cognitive maps can be
used to model, analyse and represent this linguistic local knowledge.
