Citation: Marzouki, A.; Mellouli, S.; Daniel, S. The Identification of Stakeholders’ Living Contexts in Stakeholder Participation Data: A Semantic, Spatial and Temporal Analysis. Land 2022, 11, 798. https://doi.org/10.3390/ land11060798 Academic Editor: Thomas Panagopoulos Received: 5 April 2022 Accepted: 19 May 2022 Published: 28 May 2022 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). land Article The Identification of Stakeholders’ Living Contexts in Stakeholder Participation Data: A Semantic, Spatial and Temporal Analysis Amal Marzouki 1, *, Sehl Mellouli 2 and Sylvie Daniel 3 1 Department of Information Systems, Université du Québec à Rimouski, Campus de Lévis 1595 Boulevard Alphonse-Desjardins, Lévis, QC G6V 0A6, Canada 2 Department of Information Systems, Université Laval, 2325, rue de la Terrasse, Québec, QC G1V 0A6, Canada; sehl.mellouli@fsa.ulaval.ca 3 Department of Geomatics, Université Laval, 1055, Avenue du Séminaire, Québec, QC G1V 0A6, Canada; sylvie.daniel@scg.ulaval.ca * Correspondence: amal_marzouki@uqar.ca; Tel.: +1-418-9288-182 Abstract: Stakeholders’ Participation (SP) aims to involve stakeholders in decision-making processes about significant choices affecting their organizations, cities, or communities. Stakeholders’ partici- pation is maintained through SP processes (SPPs) that may be traditional (e.g., physical assemblies) or online (e.g., online forums). Whether traditional or online, the purpose of SPPs is to collect and analyze data in a way that it would bring a benefit to a given decision-making process. In SPPs, stakeholders try to communicate (a part of) their living contexts, i.e., to present their objectives, daily problems, intentions, and issues they are facing within their environment. A major challenge of decision-makers is then to ensure that the living contexts of stakeholders are considered in SPPs for an effective implementation of project and policies. This paper focuses on the specific issue of the “stakeholders’ living context identification” and attempts to account for how stakeholders implicitly identify their living contexts in their SP comments. Based on a qualitative analysis of SP data from four case studies in two countries, this paper identified a set of semantic, spatial, and temporal patterns allowing to capture the stakeholders’ living contexts in SPPs data. Moreover, a conceptual model emphasizing the importance for decision-makers to capture and understand semantic, spatial, and temporal dimensions in SPPs is proposed. Keywords: stakeholder participation; stakeholders’ living contexts; semantic data analysis; spatial data analysis; temporal data analysis; place-based knowledge 1. Introduction Stakeholder Participation Processes (SPPs) aim to reinforce the engagement of stake- holders in decision-making processes about significant choices affecting, for example, their organizations, cities or communities. They are designated as “two-way dialogues” bringing several benefits compared to “one-way processes” [1]. Unlike the approaches where only decision-makers and experts identify the problem and the potential solutions, the involve- ment of various stakeholders through SPPs may lead to better decisions [2]. Stakeholder Participation (SP) in decision-making processes brings information from different stake- holders with a diversity of views, values and needs. Over recent years, cities, governments as well as other public and private organizations adopted SPPs to increase the effectiveness of their decision-making processes [3]. With the emergence of Information and Commu- nication Technologies (ICTs), SPPs took new forms by the use of, for example, dedicated solutions or social media platforms, which led to the concept of electronic participation (e-participation). Even though e-participation gained much significance as a buzzword, it maintains the same goals of participation in its traditional form that are increasing the Land 2022, 11, 798. https://doi.org/10.3390/land11060798 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/land