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Abstract:
Decision making on spatial planning problems has to integrate recent
advancements on geographical information systems with a framework that
supports fair, rational and efficient decision making procedures. Such
a framework will assist government and businesses with the retrieval, use
and reuse of information in cooperative, distributed planning procedures
requiring access to spatial data. This paper gives an overview of a computer-mediated
group decision support system for the World Wide Web, called Zeno. The
target is to provide intelligent assistance to human mediators and other
kinds of trusted third parties during the above procedures. The role of
the system is to remain neutral and help assure that the interests and
goals of all members of a group, regardless of their status, are respected
and appreciated.
The Zeno mediation system is based on a formal model of argumentation
evolved from the informal models of Toulmin and Rittel. Its main feature
is a labelling function using arguments to compute heuristic information
about the relative quality of the alternative positions proposed as solutions
for some practical issue.
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