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Sulin Ba[1], Aimo Hinkkanen[2], and Andrew B. Whinston[11]
Department of Management Science and Information Systems, Graduate School of Business, CBA 5.202, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712, USA, {sulin, abw}@bongo.cc.utexas.edu
[2]Department of Mathematics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801, USA, aimo@symcom.math.uiuc.edu
Organizations often face complicated decision making problems. As the corporate knowledge is becoming more and more dispersed, there is a need to analyze organization wide issues that incorporate a wide range of knowledge representations and data types, and this can be supported by computers.
The growth of distributed computing and the emergence of research on digital libraries provide new insights to decision support systems (DSS) research. In this paper, we look at digital library from a business point of view: what services provided by a digital library would be particularly useful to industries? The digital library in this context is a repository of executable documents that has different parts scattered around on different platforms across the network. We propose to utilize this digital library to build an enterprise wide problem solving system that is based on executable documents that contain knowledge represented in a mathematical form, given that a considerable amount of company information is mathematical. The system is aimed to answer "what if" and "what to do" questions and to provide explanations for the proposed approach.
Keywords: Decision support systems, digital library, document composition, organizational decision support.
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