Incubator Group Report: Towards a Semantic Decision Representation Format

The W3C Decisions and Decision-Making Incubator Group has published their final report. The mission of the Decisions and Decision-Making Incubator Group, part of the Incubator Activity, was to determine the requirements, use cases, and a representation of decisions and decision-making in a collaborative and networked environment suitable for leading to a potential standard for decision exchange, shared situational awareness, and measurement of the speed, effectiveness, and human factors of decision-making. The Incubator Group explored the question over the last year, including use cases, requirements and formats for representing decisions in a machine-understandable format. A standardized decision format would allow the decisions that occur everyday to be managed, archived, shared, and tracked. Two key benefits include the ability to expand and advance the meaningful use of web linked data, as well as the ability to tie-in domain knowledge to provide decision context. The final report captures the major accomplishments and results of the incubator group and ends with a recommendation to transition into a W3C Working Group for the establishment of a Decision Markup Language (DecisionML).

This publication is part of the Incubator Activity, a forum where W3C Members can innovate and experiment. This work is not on the W3C standards track.