Languages for Decision Support Systems: An Overview

In this paper we survey some issues relating to the languageinterfaces provided by DSS. We do this from the point-of-view of thedesigner of generalized software for building DSS. We first describe a fairly general architecture for such software. This is followed bya brief examination of the language interface components. We list thefunctions that must be provided through the language facilities of aDSS together with a number of implementation issues such asUser-friendliness, degree of procedurality and interpretation versuscompilation. This provides a useful framework for the comparativeevaluation of DSS packages. Finally we discuss some possible directions for future development including specialized formallanguages and the potential of English-like 'semi-natural' languages.

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