A User-centered Multicriteria Spatial Decision Analysis Model for Participatory Decision Making: An Ontology-based Approach

Integration of GIS and Multicriteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) in the Web environment has recently gained much attention in participatory (collaborative) spatial decision making. This research trend has focused on the development and use of Web-based collaborative spatial MCDA (SMCDA) systems. The systems are often based on the views of the experts (planning practitioners, analysts) and provide only generic SMCDA methods for participatory decision making. Furthermore, they do not provide the participants with a choice of their own criteria, alternatives, and preferences. This research seeks to alleviate this shortcoming by proposing a user-centered SMCDA. The proposed approach structures the SMCDA elements using the formalism of ontological knowledge representation. The system provides the users with an adaptive and customizable participatory Web-based SMCDA. It enables the participants to modify the pre-defined SMCDA model according to their preferences. Each user/participant can define his/her decision alternatives, constraints, evaluation criteria (the criterion weights), and generate his/her solutions to a given decision problem, then the individual solutions can be aggregated into a collective/group solution using the voting method. The paper presents a prototype implementation of the ontological approach to collaborative SMCDA. The approach is illustrated with a parking site selection problem in the City of Tehran, Iran.