An entity-relationship approach to decision support and expert systems

Abstract There has been an increasing interest in integrating decision support systems and expert systems to provide decision makers a more accessible, productive and domain-independent information and computing environment. In this paper, we review a workstation-based expert decision support system (WXDSS) proposed by Chen and Pruett. A database-oriented design process is discussed consisting of four phases: (1) requirements analysis, (2) conceptual framework, (3) logical design, and (4) physical system implementation. An entity-relationship (ER) approach to the design of conceptual framework is studied. A positive characteristic of the ER approach is that it provides the user an enterprise view of the WXDSS that is independent of how the information is stored and processed.

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