Research Directions for Spatial Decision Support

Spatial decision support has recently received more and more attention in many disciplines and organizations. In order to examine its research directions, the nature of spatial decision support and its special requirements are first examined in this paper. The basic task of spatial decision support is clarified in this paper to be as to provide the decision makers with their required spatial information and to enhance their ability to select or generate alternative actions (solutions), and to represent and simulate their spatial situations or consequences. It is therefore argued that future research directions in spatial decision support should be to establish an efficient spatial information infrastructure and develop spatial decision support systems (SDSS). While the main problems to be solved in the context of spatial information infrastructure are related to spatial information networking, spatial data management, spatial data collection and value-added analysis, etc., the aspects related to the representation, generation and selection of spatial action(s) in the spatial decision making process should be enhanced in SDSS research.