Knowledge-driven systems for episodic decision support

•Decision support systems rely on collaborative and episodic participation.•Large decision knowledge bases can include varying knowledge representations.•We introduce an approach to implement such systems in a coherent manner.•The approach is based on semantic technologies and web standards.•A case study describes experiences with a decision support system in industrial use for years.

The paper describes a new approach of developing and maintaining state-of-the-art decision support systems. Such systems are able to capture the collaborative work on decision problems over time. Due to the complexity of large problem spaces a multi-modal knowledge representation is proposed. For the realization of a multi-modal knowledge base we integrate semantic technologies as a fundamental layer by combining the W3C ontologies PROV-O and SKOS. The approach is demonstrated by an implementation report of an industrially deployed decision support system.