An Approach to Assessing the Informativeness of Data to Meet the Information Needs of Decision Support System Users

Decision support systems are used in a variety of fields. This paper considers a class of multisubject decision support systems with a geo-interface. The users of such systems are decision makers. The main purpose of any decision support system is to provide the information required by the user. In other words, the decision support system should satisfy the information needs of the user. To make this process more efficient, it is necessary to have a model of the user’s information needs. This paper describes a model and a formalised iterative procedure for satisfying the user’s information needs. This model is developed on the basis of thesaurus approach and allows to use original pragmatic and semantic evaluations of informativeness of spatial data. The methods of system analysis and ontological design, as well as methods of calculating the semantic similarity of concepts for thesauruses of the system and the user were used to create the model. The description of the user information needs model is based on the mathematical apparatus of set theory. The obtained results can be useful for solving the problem of creating effective methods of human-computer interaction. The use of the model and procedure for satisfying the user’s information needs in the development of decision support systems allows to increase the efficiency of user interaction with the system to solve various applied problems.