1.1. Background
DSS research has, ever since first introduced in the
1960’s (initially the term was Management Informa- tion Systems - the DSS term did not become widely used until the early 80’s), been a highly diverse field of research, drawing on influences from numerous other areas, including both social sciences and technology development. As already mentioned, one could view DSS more as an application field, rather than a ba- sic research field. Both DSS and the Semantic Web have, for instance, been known to apply technologies originally developed in the context of Artificial In- telligence (AI), as well as general Web technologies, e.g., for so-called Web DSS. DSS have also had a strong focus on models since the start, and today some of the main techniques of Business Intelligence (as a sub-field of DSS) include multidimensional mod-els, data cubes, and OLAP (Online Analytical Pro- cessing) [76] - all making heavy use of formal mod- els. Another related field is Information Retrieval (IR), where many early search engines and document index- ing approaches were originally targeted at Knowledge Management (KM) or managerial support within en- terprises, hence, related to DSS.
The diversity of the field is partly due to the many types of stakeholders involved, i.e., since we are all decision-makers in some context (either personal or professional) different DSS need to target all such types of decision-makers and decision-making con- texts respectively. DSS can also be viewed from sev- eral different perspectives. For instance, according to [77] DSS can be divided into Model-driven DSS, Data- driven DSS, Communications-driven DSS, Document- driven DSS, and Knowledge-driven DSS.
The Model-driven DSS operates on some model of reality, in order to optimize or simulate outcomes of decisions based on data provided. In these systems the model is at focus, and can be accessed and manipu- lated by the decision maker in order to analyze a cer- tain situation, while the amount of data may not be large. A classical example is a financial decision sup- port system, using financial models to predict the im- pact of certain managerial decisions on the econom- ical key indicators of the business. Data-driven DSS on the other hand focus on the access and manipula- tion of large amounts of data, e.g., Data Warehousing systems, or even more elementary system such as file systems with search and retrieval capabilities.
While data-driven DSS focus on retrieving and ma- nipulating data, Document-driven DSS use text or mul- timedia document collections as their basis of decision information. Document analysis and IR systems are simple examples from this category. Communications- driven DSS, on the other hand, focus on the interaction and collaboration aspects of decision making. Simple examples include groupware and video-conferencing systems that allow distributed and networked decision- making. Finally, Knowledge-driven DSS are those that actually recommend or suggest actions to the users, rather than just retrieve information relevant to a cer- tain decision, i.e., these systems try to perform some part of the actual decision making for the user through special-purpose problem-solving capabilities. As can be noted, many of the examples above include systems that we may not consider as particularly “decision- oriented” by today’s standards, but which were in many cases originally proposed as DSS tools.
In this paper, however, we choose to refer to an alter- native categorization of DSS, which divides DSS into the following (overlapping) categories [11], targeting the purpose of the DSS rather than its internal struc- ture:
– Personal DSS – A DSS supporting individuals in their decision-making.
– Group DSS – A DSS supporting a group of peo- ple making a joint decision.
– Negotiation DSS – A DSS supporting negotiation leading up to a decision situation.
– Intelligent DSS – A DSS incorporating some form of “intelligent analysis” functionality, i.e., not only supplying a user with raw (possibly fil- tered) data, but processing that data in some way as to produce more meaningful information.
– Business Intelligence (BI) – A DSS targeted at data representing the state of an enterprise.
– Data Warehousing – A DSS infrastructure incor- porating a set of data sources that are integrated by means of some unifying model.
– Knowledge-management DSS – A DSS targeted at Knowledge Management (KM) in some orga- nization.
Compared to the categorization of [77] we note that BI and Data Warehousing are today most often Data- driven DSS, while Intelligent DSS are more related to Knowledge-driven DSS or in some cases Model- driven DSS. Communication-driven DSS are usually either Group DSS or Negotiation DSS. Personal and Knowledge-management DSS are cross-cutting cate- gories which may be of more or less any of the cate- gories in [77].