The purpose of this paper is to propose and justify requirements for the design of a protocol suite for deploying and sharing Specific DSSs both within and across organizations by utilizing the World Wide Web (WWW) infrastructure and a client/server decomposition model. At the heart of the model proposed for the protocol suite is an approach for inter-agent communication as adapted from the distributed artificial intelligence literature. A modularized layered approach to protocol specification, and three sample client interfaces derived from the protocol are presented. Our approach is contrasted to alternative schemes for decision model access across wide area networks.
