Towards an Intelligent Decision Support Architecture in Extended-Enterprises

Decision-makers exploit several channels to acquire up-to-date and reliable information, which they combine with background knowledge to formulate their decisions. In the last years, such information is increasingly acquired from the Internet by a conceptually straightforward process that involves: the identification of relevant information sources, the specification of filters that query the sources regularly and return the relevant documents in a local repository, the extraction of the information pieces of interest and the integration of these information pieces with previously accumulated information for subsequent querying or statistical analysis. In this paper, we present a distributed, service-oriented architecture for decision making systems based on Web services, and intelligent agents.