Handling Knowledge-Based Decision Making Issues in Collaborative Settings: An Integrated Approach

Decision making is widely considered as a fundamental organizational activity that comprises a series of knowledge representation and processing tasks. Admitting that the quality of a decision depends on the quality of the knowledge used to make it, it is argued that the enhancement of the decision making efficiency and effectiveness is strongly related to the appropriate exploitation of all possible organizational knowledge resources. Taking the above remarks into account, this paper presents a multidisciplinary approach for capturing the organizational knowledge in order to augment teamwork in terms of knowledge elicitation, sharing and construction, thus enhancing decision making quality. Based on a properly defined ontology model, our approach is supported by a web-based tool that serves as a forum of reciprocal knowledge exchange, conveyed through structured argumentative discourses, the ultimate aim being to support the related decision making process. The related knowledge is represented through a Discourse Graph, which is structured and evaluated according to the knowledge domain of the problem under consideration.