Active information systems in support of decision making

One of the most acute problems confronting decision-makers is in forming a faithful image of how critical data, that is necessary for problem solving, is structured and how it can be combined to generate information useful for decision making. Conventional data management systems offer very little in this direction due to their inherent inability to offer rich knowledge representation capabilities and inferencing. The authors examine ways to surmount these obstacles through the use of a highly interactive environment which is capable of reasoning about the problem at hand and respond intelligently to the decision-maker