Scientific and engineering improvement of environmental risk management - Environmental Deterioration and Contamination: Problems and their Management - page 407

Figure 11.8 Decision making based on data: the pyramid of knowledge management (KM: knowledge
management, DST: decision-support tool).

A decision-support tool is specially arranged knowledge—as it is shown in Figure
11.9—on a path leading to the final decision, the choice between alternatives. The
tools supporting the decision makers can be the following:

- Data, information and knowledge bases able to gather, store, retrieve and organize

data, information and knowledge;

- Paradigms, frameworks or perspectives that help one to “get a handle'' on the

situation;

- Models that enable answers to “what if?'' questions;

- Techniques or tools that analyze or help to narrow down the field of choice, with

the help of flow charts, decision trees, importance matrices, etc.;

- Tools and techniques that aid visualization of the data or problem space on maps,

in diagrams and tables, etc.;

- Management techniques or philosophies.

An expert system is a computer system, containing decision-support tools and
knowledge bases creating a type of artificial intelligence, emulating the decision making
ability of a human expert. Expert systems are designed to solve complex problems by
reasoning about knowledge, like an expert.
A dynamic solution for ERM—similar to any soft system methodology (SSM)
(Checkland & Scholes, 1990)—consists of several steps such as entering the problem,