Site selection process depends on a number of spatial and business-related factors, making it a complex decision-making
task. It is common for the decision makers to use their subjective judgment and gut feelings based on their experience in
selecting the most appropriate site for development. The reason is that data for site selection originate from varied sources and
are not organized in a format that decision makers can readily use to derive any meaningful information. One possible solution
of this problem is to develop a decision support system (DSS) to help retrieve data from different databases and information
sources and analyze them in order to provide useful and explicit information. Based on this concept, a DSS is presented in this
paper as an aid to builders/developers in site selection for residential housing development. The prototype DSS is developed
using data warehousing technology, which is a fairly recent database management technique. It is an improved approach for
integrating data from multiple, often very large, distributed, heterogeneous databases and other information sources. Data
warehousing is based on online analytical processing (OLAP) concept. The OLAP analyzes data using special data warehousing
schemas and enables users to view data using any combination of variables. The users can also generate data trends over a
period of time to make any forecasts. First reviewed in this paper are the concepts of data warehousing, OLAP and advantages
of the data warehouse over traditional databases in the context of decision making. Next, a step-by-step methodology is
presented to illustrate the different stages of the prototype DSS development. The DSS design is illustrated with particular
emphasis on the development of data warehousing schemas and analytical processing techniques. The prototype DSS has been
developed with input and refined with feedback obtained from selected local builder/developer companies. Finally, the
application of the prototype DSS for selecting the most appropriate residential site for development from among a list of several
available sites is presented