On Constructing Semantic Decision Tables

Decision tables are a widely used knowledge management tool in the decision making process. Ambiguity and conceptual reasoning difficulties arise while designing large decision tables in a collaborative environment. We introduce the notion of Semantic Decision Table (SDT), which enhances a decision table with explicit decision semantics by annotating it properly with a domain ontology. In this paper, we focus on the SDT construction process. First, we map decision items to the ontology by building a rooted tree of decision binary facts and visualize it in a scalable manner. Formal ontological roles are used during this mapping process. Then, we commit the decision rules to the mapping results with a high level pseudo-natural language to ground their semantic. We illustrate with an SDT example from the domain of human resource management.