Decision Support Systems Usefulness and A Practical Solution Based on Semantic Web Technologies

Nowadays Decision Support Systems deal with impressive amount of information. Current Decision Support Systems are customized solutions, possible to be used only in the context for which they were developed. In addition to this the information integration is other common problem of the Decision Support Systems. This paper tries to outline the main idea that in order that Decision Support Systems users' to be satisfied with the solution provided two conditions must be assured: the possibility to apply knowledge at the decision moment and place by the decision makers and the semantic integration of information. In this work we analyze the direct influence of the two conditions enunciated above and we came with a solution that is based on ontology, Semantic Web technologies and inference engine. We demonstrate the contribution of our approach by undertaking three scenarios from business decision making processes.