Decision support system prototypes for greenhouse advice

The increases in greenhouse gases in the Earth's atmosphere create an air pollution problem of global proportions. Following the submission of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climatic Change (IPCC) Reports to the United Nations at the end of 1990, there have been rapid and urgent demands for policy advice on the human enhancement of the greenhouse effect. This paper reviews two prototype greenhouse information systems developed jointly by Macquarie University and the CSIRO Division of Information Technology in Australia. Both prototype decision support systems were designed for non-expert end-users, but during the course of the project some problems were identified. These include the range of information demanded and the method of identifying and then exploiting a set of short statements culled from publications, originally conceived as a link for non-experts, into the larger knowledge base. The single clearest result of our prototype studies is the urgent need to enhance the software and, especially, decision support, for the experts themselves.