A Design Environment Ontology for Stakeholder-developed Decision Support Tools in the Australian Dairy Industry

Abstract

A significant number of decision support systems (DSS) are available for rural applications. However, many of these have low adoption rates because they have been developed with little end-user engagement, limited ease of use by farmers, and the identified gap in understanding significant problems between the DSS developers and the potential end-users in the development process. A useable development environment that prioritises end-user engagement can be expected to reduce the known DSS development difficulties and to improve the development of appropriate decision support tools. To date however few significant attempts have been made to outline sophisticated models for a design environment that offers an adaptable and effective solution for end-user DSS development. This paper describes ongoing work in ontology construction and knowledge elicitation part of the development of an end-user enabled design environment (EUEDE). In general the EUEDE will assist rural business stakeholders to build their own target-relevant decision making tools. We describe in the first instance, the ontology for EUEDE that will allow dairy stakeholders to outline domain-specific decision making scenarios that will lead to the building of relevant DSS.