Group Decision Making and Graphical Visualization in E-cognocracy

E-cognocracy [Moreno-Jiménez, 2003, 2006; Moreno-Jiménez and Polasek, 2003, 2005] is a new democratic system conceived for the purpose of extracting and diffusing the knowledge derived from the scientific resolution of complex problems that arise in the field of public decision making. For both the modelling and resolution of problems and the diffusion of knowledge, e-cognocracy uses multicriteria decision making techniques. Similarly, with the aim of facilitating knowledge extraction, discussion through collaborative tools, the negotiation processes between the actors involved in the resolution of the problem and both individual and collective learning, ecognocracy employs a wide range of graphical visualization tools. This paper presents a set of procedures oriented towards group decision making, for both a reduced and a high number of actors, which use graphical visualization as starting point in the creation of knowledge all the participants involved in the problem resolution. These procedures show the potential of the graphical visualization tools that have been developed within our research group, the Zaragoza Multicriteria Decision Making Group (GDMZ).