An XML-Based Group Decision Support System for Enhanced Collaboration
Progress Q. T. Mtshali, Raghu Korrapati · Academy of Information and Management Sciences journal · 2000
INTRODUCTION Scheduling business meetings to make important decisions is becoming harder and harder as more business mergers take place. Decisions that are made, under these circumstances, affect more than just one branch or location of merged companies and corporations. Collaboration among branches is necessary in order to achieve a consensus among decision-makers that are nationally and geographically dispersed. Virtual meetings are used to bring together decision-makers. There are a number of ways that have been devised to make virtual meetings possible across local area networks (LANs) and across the Internet for those companies that have access to the Internet (Patrizio, 2000). Global decision support systems (GDSS) facilitate collaboration among decision-makers that are geographically dispersed. However, virtual meetings can sometimes face problems if the branch offices use different computer systems. Some branches' computer systems might run Microsoft Windows operating systems such as MS Windows 95/NT/2000 while other branches might run Sun Solaris, Linux or other UNIX variants. These operating systems use different data format to encode data. Web-enabled GDSSs attempt to remedy this problem by using the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) to encode data. HTML encoded data can be viewed by different decision-makers using a Web browser that is available for their computing platform. HTML uses static tags to encode data. HTML generated documents do not provide a good environment for interactive exchange of data. HTML documents tend to be relegated to providing a means of capturing data from users or displaying the contents of a user written documents. Dynamic HTML documents are desirable in situations where interactive exchange of data and information is necessary. Active Server Pages (ASP), Java Active Pages (JSP), and Python Active Pages (PSP) have been proposed as methods of providing the dynamic element in HTML documents. The dynamic element is provided by the injection of scripting languages in HTML documents. ASP supports Netscape's JavaScript, Microsoft's JScript, Microsoft's VBScript and PerlScript languages. JSP and PSP support the Java, and Python programming respectively. These active pages, however, do not solve the problem of data exchange between different computing environments. The Extensible Markup Language (XML) has been proposed to solve this particular problem (Linthicum, 1999; Murayama, Tamara and Uramoto, 1999). XML is designed to provide a sound structural method of maintaining state information. In this paper, a GDSS that is based on XML, ASP, and HTML technologies is proposed. It will be referred to as XML-GDSS. The goals of this GDSS will be: 1 To provide an asynchronous means of collaboration between members of a decision team 2 To use a discussion rationale model in order to enhance the discuss process among the decision team members 3 To provide a voting mechanism that will allow team members to select among alternatives 4 To provide an environment that is based on platform independent data formats for exchanging data and information A prototype for the implementation of the XML-GDSS goals is under construction. The prototype is being developed using Microsoft Visual Studio 6.0, which provides an environment for developing Web pages and object components. The paper is organized as follows. Previous GDSS related models that provided the framework for XML-GDSS are outlined. The three-tier architecture used in XML-GDSS is discussed followed by a discussion of each of the three layers. The paper concludes by outlining what is being learned from XML-GDSS and future enhancements to the prototype. RELATED WORK One of the most popular rationale discussion models that is used in GDSSs is the Issue Based Information System (IBIS) (Becker, 1997). This model uses hypertext technology and thus could be implemented using XML and/or HTML. …