Enhancing the Decision Making Process: An Ontology-based Approach

Decision making is a key activity for management in any organization, several decision making methods including Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) have been used to assist this process especially when the decision involves multiple stakeholders and multiple criteria. These methods, which evaluate each alternative by a set of criteria, tend to be subjective in nature. However, although they are subjective it should be ensured that the decisions makers have as much knowledge about the alternatives as is possible. This would include understanding all the consequences of each alternative and all the effects of these consequences. This requires a thorough understanding of the domain within which the decision is being made. We argue that an organizational ontology provides this understanding and propose a method for integrating an ontology into typical multi-criteria decision making techniques. The overall aim of this method is to improve the decision making process. We demonstrate the applicability of this method by applying it to decision making at a university in the Caribbean.