Ebook: Cognition-Driven Decision Support for Business Intelligence: Models, Techniques, Systems and Applications

Cognition-driven decision support system (DSS) has been recognized as a paradigm in the research and development of business intelligence (BI). Cognitive decision support aims to help managers in their decision making from human cognitive aspects, such as thinking, sensing, understanding and predicting, and fully reuse their experience. Among these cognitive aspects, decision makers’ situation awareness (SA) and mental models are considered to be two important prerequisites for decision making, particularly in ill-structured and dynamic decision situations with uncertainties, time pressure and high personal stake. In today’s business domain, decision making is becoming increasingly complex. To make a successful decision, managers’ SA about their business environments becomes a critical factor.

This book presents theoretical models as well practical techniques of cognitiondriven DSS. It first introduces some important concepts of cognition orientation in decision making process and some techniques in related research areas including DSS, data warehouse and BI, offering readers a preliminary for moving forward in this book. It then proposes a cognition-driven decision process (CDDP) model which incorporates SA and experience (mental models) as its central components. The goal of the CDDP model is to facilitate cognitive decision support to managers on the basis of BI systems. It also presents relevant techniques developed to support the implementation of the CDDP model in a BI environment. Key issues addressed of a typical business decision cycle in the CDDP model include:

• natural language interface for a manager’s SA input;
• extraction of SA semantics;
• construction of data warehouse queries based on the manger’s SA and
• experience;
• situation information retrieval from data warehouse;
• how the manager perceives situation information and update SA;
• how the manager’s SA leads to a final decision.

Finally, a cognition-driven DSS, FACETS, and two illustrative applications of this system are discussed.

This book represents the peer-reviewed proceedings of the Third International Symposium on Intelligent Distributed Computing – IDC 2009 held in Ayia Napa, Cyprus during October 13-14, 2009.

The 36 contributions in this book address many topics related to theory and applications of intelligent distributed computing, including: actor-agent systems, agentbased simulation, autonomic computing, computational service economies, defeasible reasoning, distributed data mining, distributed logic programming, e-learning, emergent properties in complex systems, formal methods of intelligent distributed systems, genetic and evolutionary algorithms, information retrieval, knowledge fusion, multi-sensor networks, mobile ad hoc networks, mobile computing, ontologies and metadata, peer-to-peer networks, process modeling and integration, remote sensing distributed systems, secure e-payment systems, social networks, surveillance and disaster management applications, swarm computing, Web services and systems.