The central issue in strategy formulation and implementation process, or strategy-making, is the identification of environmental forces and the preparation of a plan of action to deal with them. This necessitates scanning the environment for gathering information. Environmental scanning should enable the firm to identify these forces. Doing this not only calls for information gathering, but als...

Increasing the production rate and minimizing the related costs, while optimizing the safety measures, are nowadays’ most important tasks in the mining industry. To these ends, mechanization of mines could be applied, which can result in significant cost reductions and higher levels of profitability for underground mines. The potential of a coal mine mechanization depends on some important fact...

decision support systems (dsss) are prevalent information systems for decision making in many competitive business environments. in a dss, decision making process is intimately related to some factors which determine the quality of information systems and their related products. traditional approaches to data analysis usually cannot be implemented in sophisticated companies, where managers need...

decision support systems (dsss) are prevalent information systems for decision making in many competitive business environments. in a dss, decision making process is intimately related to some factors which determine the quality of information systems and their related products. traditional approaches to data analysis usually cannot be implemented in sophisticated companies, where managers nee...

Information retrieval may suggest a document, and information extraction may tell us what it says, but which information sources do we trust and which assertions do we believe when different authors make conflicting claims? Trust algorithms known as fact-finders attempt to answer these questions, but consider only which source makes which claim, ignoring a wealth of background knowledge and con...

we analyze a sequential decision making process, in which at each stepthe decision is made in two stages. in the rst stage a partially optimalaction is chosen, which allows the decision maker to learn how to improveit under the new environment. we show how inertia (cost of changing)may lead the process to converge to a routine where no further changesare made. we illustrate our scheme with som...

The traditional view of data, information, and knowledge as a hierarchy fosters an understanding of information as an independent entity with objective meaning—that while information is tied to data and knowledge, its existence is not dependent upon them. While traditional conceptions assume a static nature of information, expressed by the equation information = data + meaning, we have argued t...