1.Introduction
Decision Support (DS) is a field that is classically attributed to the social sciences, e.g., supporting man- agers to make better decisions. However, since the in- ception of the IS (Information Systems) field of re- search in the 60’s, part of this community has been devoted to Decision Support Systems (DSS). Under this label we have seen many different kinds of sys- tems presented, e.g., anything from spreadsheet ap- plications for analyzing data, via communication sup- port for group decision making, to Expert Systems and other kinds of “intelligent” approaches. Similar to the Semantic Web, DSS could be viewed more as an ap- plication area rather than a basic research field. Nev- ertheless, in the Semantic Web field a number of fun- damental results have emerged, such as logical lan- guages for knowledge representation and their syntac- tic formats for sharing information on the Web. These
could potentially impact other application fields that also make use of the Web as a medium for sharing in- formation, or simply act as an inspiration for informa- tion sharing in general. In this paper we thereby at- tempt to provide a comprehensive view of the current intersection between the DSS and Semantic Web areas, by (i) performing a structured literature survey, and (ii) presenting the results of a set of interviews with DSS practitioners and comparing them to previous studies, as well as (iii) analyzing the potential future needs of the DSS area where Semantic Web technologies could contribute (based on (i) and (ii)).
Superficially, the Semantic Web shares many goals with DSS, e.g., being able to precisely interpret infor- mation, in order to deliver relevant, reliable and accu- rate information to a user when and where it is needed. DSS have in addition more specific goals, since the in- formation need is targeted towards making a particular decision, e.g., making a plan or reacting to a certain sit- uation. In the following section (Sect. 1.1), we provide a brief background of DSS (the reader is assumed to be familiar with the Semantic Web field, or is referred to surveys on Semantic Web technologies for DSS researchers and practitioners such as [17,24,41,65]). Section 2 describes the setup and results of the struc- tured literature survey, which is used for mapping out the current semantic DSS landscape, and subsequently in Section 3 our interview study with DSS practitioners is presented. In Section 4 we summarize our findings, and discuss the potentials and limits of Semantic Web technologies for DSS, as well as future needs, before we conclude in Section 5.