Getting serious about integrating decision support mechanisms into Geographic Information Systems

Although Geographic Information Systems have been extensively used by decision makers when dealing with spatial related issues, most of them do not provide the functionalities for supporting the classic decision making process. This process consists in identifying the problem, modelling the situation, and then a cycle in which the decision maker(s) generates various scenarios according to different hypotheses and evaluates them until a satisfactory solution to the problem is identified. In this work we present a system which allows for implementing a decision making cycle, abstracting the modelling, minimizing the knowledge about GIS needed, allowing building of several scenarios and comparing them easily. A key element of this system is the scenarios generating language, a SQL-like language which allows for easy specification of characteristics that a suitability map should have and show the results to the user in a versatile way.