General overview
Decision support systems are (usually) computerized information systems to support decision making. According to Langefors (1973) an information system is a technological system to store data and draw conclusions from this data. DDS have evolved from research on organized decision making and on interactive computer systems conducted in the 1960s (Keen, 1978) and have become a standard tool for many organisations from the 1980s onwards.
They can be classified as "active", "passive" and "cooperative" systems: An "active" DSS is a system that aids decision making and recommends certain solutions. A "passive" DSS on the other hand does only support the decision finding process. Last but not least a "cooperative" DSS allows the system operator to interactively modify data in the system to evaluate different solutions (Haettenschwiler, 1999).
Examples for the use of DSS are manifold. Most intensively it is probably used in business management, but other uses include the decision support for medical doctors or engenieers. For each of these uses one can usually find commercial software applications and recently also a growing number of open-source alternatives. Overall one can say that DSS benefit the user in decision efficiency and might also lead to new ways of thinking about a certain solution. It can also give support in difficult multi-criteria decisions and provides a systematic approach to quality control in decision making.
Implementation plan
To create our own simple DSS to aid decision makers in the use of TK, we plan to create a small web-based set of questions and evaluation tools to integrate into our TK website. Furthermore we plan to investigate if a already existing software like “Dicodess” could be supplied with a dataset of TK related concepts.