Decision Support Components on the Internet

Manfred A. Jeusfeld, Tung X. Bui

           Operational software like online transaction processing
           systems still take the lion's share of business information
           systems. Though many Decision Support Systems (DSS) were
           developed, they failed to become mainstream products. The
           reason is lack of knowledge of availability, applicability,
           and interoperability. In this paper, we propose to exploit
           the vast resource of the Internet to give DSS a second
           chance. Contrasting to other approaches, our strategy is
           bottom-up, i.e., users and developers of DSS's cooperate in
           weaving a web of distributed DSS components. Repositories
           serve for ensuring application-centered consistency and for
           searching. The method is scaleable in number of processors,
           application domains, and platforms. A script language for
           combining DSS components is introduced based on observations
           from a real life example of a multi-national company.