Abstract
Decision makers are expected to make decisions which have a positive effect on the future of their enterprises. We expect that intelligent information systems support their activities. Today, databases and web-based resources, accessed through effective communications, make information about the past rapidly available. To project the future the decision makers either have to use intuition or employ tool for prediction, and initialize such tools with information obtained from an information system to such tools. An effective information system should integrate forecasting the future, and because there choices have been made, such a system must also support the comparative assessment of the effects of alternate decisions. The complexity of an information system handling the past, and multiple futures will be great, and must be modularized with effective interfaces. We recommend the use of an SQL-like interface language to access existing tools to assess the future, as spreadsheets and simulations. Making results of simulations accessible as another contribution to integrated information systems has the potential of greatly augmenting their effectiveness and really support decision-making.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Aberle, D., Dionisio, J., McNitt-Gray, M., Taira, R., Cardenas, A., Goldin, J., Bown, K., Figlin, R., and Chu, W. (1996). Integrated Multimedia Timeline of Medical Images and Data for Thoracic Oncology Patients, Imaging and Therapeutic Technology, 16(3), 669–681.
Bhatnagar and Kanal, L.N. (1986). Handling Uncertain Information: A Review of Numeric and Non-numeric Methods. In Kanal and Lemmer (Eds.), Uncertainty in AI. North-Holland Publishers.
Connolly, D. (Ed.) (1997). XML: Principles, Tools, and Techniques. O'Reilly.
Das, A.K., Shahar, Y., Tu, S.W., and Musen, M.A. (1994). A Temporal-Abstraction Mediator for Protocol-Based Decision Support. In Proceedings of the Eighteenth Annual Symposium on Computer Applications in Medicine, Washington DC (pp. 320–324).
Date, C.J. and Darwen, H. (1993). A Guide to the SQL Standard, 3rd edn. Addison Wesley.
DeZegher-Geets, I., Freeman, A.G., Walker, M.G., Blum, R.L., and Wiederhold, G. (1988). Summarization and Display of On-Line Medical Records, M.D. Computing, 5(3), 38–46.
Fishwick, P. and Hill, D. (Eds.) (1998). 1998 International Conference on Web-Based Modeling & Simulation. Society for Computer Simulation. http://www.cis.ufl.edu/»fishwick/webconf.html.
GarciaMolina, H., Barbara, D., and Porter, D. (1992). The Management of Probabilistic Data, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 4(5), 487–502.
Hammer, J., Breunig, M., Garcia-Molina, H., Nestorov, S., Vassalos, V., and Yerneni, R. (1997). Template-Based Wrappers in the TSIMMIS System, ACM Sigmod.
Healy, K. and Kilgore, R. (1997). SILK, a JAVA-Based Simulation Process Language. In Proc. of the 1997 Winter Simulation Conference, Atlanta GA (pp. 475–482).
IEEE (1998). P1561, Draft IEEE Standard for Modeling and Simulation (M&S) High Level Architecture (HLA).
Jiang, R. (1996). Report on the SimQL project; submitted to Prof. Wiederhold, CSD Stanford.
Kimball, R. (1996). The Data Warehouse. Wiley.
Linden, T. and Gaw, D. (1992). JIGSAW: Preference-Directed, Co-Operative Scheduling. In AAAI Spring Symposium: Practical Approaches to Scheduling and Planning.
McCall, G. (Ed.) (1996). New World Vistas, Air and Space Power for the 21st Century (p. 9). Air Force Scientific Advisory Board. Information Technology Volume.
Miller, G. (1956). The Magical Number Seven ± Two. Psych. Review, 68, 81–97.
Miller, J., Srila, A., and Xiang, X. (1999). The JSIM Web-based Simulation Environment. In Future Computer Systems. North-Holland: Elseviers.
Orsborn, K. (1994). Applying Next Generation Object-Oriented DBMS for Finite Element Analysis. In Litwind Risch (Ed.), Applications of Database, Lecture Notes In Computer Science, 819. Springer.
Pearl, J. (1988). Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems. Morgan-Kaufman.
Sandewall, E. and Backstrom, C. (Eds.) (1994). Current Trends in AI Planning. Amsterdam: IOS Press.
Singhal, S. (1996). Effective Remote Modeling in Large-Scale Distributed Interactive Simulation Environments. Ph.D. Thesis, Stanford CSD.
Tate, A., Drabble, B., and Kirby, R. (1992). O-Plan 2: the Open Planning Architecture. In AAAI Spring Symposium.
Van Dieren, W. (Ed.) (1995). Taking Nature Into Account: A Report to the Club of Rome. Springer-Verlag.
Wiederhold, G. (1992). Mediators in the Architecture of Future Information Systems, IEEE Computer, 25(3), 38–49.
Wiederhold, G. and Genesereth, M. (1997). The Conceptual Basis for Mediation Services, IEEE Expert, Intelligent Systems and their Applications, 12(5).
Wiederhold, G., Jiang, R., and Garcia-Molina, H. (1998). An Interface for Projecting CoAs in Support of C2. In Proc.1998 Command & Control Research & Technology Symposium, Naval Postgraduate School (pp. 549–558).
Zyda, M. (Chair) (1997). Modeling and Simulation, Linking Entertainment and Defense. Committee on Modeling and Simulation, National Academy Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Wiederhold, G. Information Systems that Really Support Decision-Making. Journal of Intelligent Information Systems 14, 85–94 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008775517030
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008775517030