Before Decision Support Systems Can Be Shared via the Web, a Common Protocol for Deploying Them Must Be Agreed Upon. a Proposal for an Open Dss Protocol

At present the Internet provides access to hundreds of gigabytes each of software, documents, sounds, images, and many other types of information [6]. It is only a matter of time before vendors begin deploying DSS on the Web on this type of scale. For DSS to be efficiently discovered on the Web, a protocol that allows DSS information to be found and transmitted must be established. In addition, a mechanism to provide a consistent organized view of DSS information is necessary. A DSS resource discovery system will need to identify a resource, collect information about it from several sources, and convert the representation to a format that can be indexed for efficient searching [6]. The purpose of this article is to propose a protocol suite that will facilitate the discovery of DSS on the Web by allowing Web pages containing DSS to be easily distinguished from other Web pages. In addition, the protocol provides a common format for describing DSS, such that autonomous intelligent search agents can identify DSS that meet specific user-defined requirements. A Proposal for an Open DSS Protocol