Factors influencing the design of a prototype decision support application for a distributed object management project

The development of decision support systems is motivated by socio-economic demand, and the opportunities offered by new hardware and software technologies. It goes without saying that these factors mutually stimulate each other as well. The purpose of this paper is to highlight some of the issues influencing the design of a prototype decision support application for a distributed object management project. Emphasis is put on features that are likely to gain widespread use since backed by mainstream companies. These are the role of deep knowledge processing tools, multimedia, and objectoriented approaches.