Your proposal will have the following elements:
(a) State your targeted problem/decision process
Examples are:
- Hotel Reservation Recommender System
- Course Selection Support System
- Vehicle Rental Service Selection System
- Home Purchase Support System
- Homework Prioritization System
(b) Describe the DSS category/type according to the AIS taxonomy of DSS
Note:
Although you are not required to choose them yet, you will be selecting two reviewersfor your project, and you will serve as a reviewer for two projects. Do this as soon aspossible after you have selected your DSS type. You may only serve as a reviewer fora project that falls into a different DSS type category. It is recommended, but notrequired, that a group of three students, each working on a different DSS type,help each other through the project, with each student relying on the other twoas reviewers. You can even work on the same problem/decision process as longas your DSS solutions fit in different categories of the AIS taxonomy of DSS.
You are free to discuss your project with anyone and are free to give advice and makerecommendations to anyone who is creating a DSS that fits in a different category thanyour own. However, you are not permitted to give advice to or discuss the project withanyone working in the same DSS category as your own.
(c) Describe at least six similar DSS you were able to find. Ideally you will not find an exactmatch. However, you will always find related work, or you aren't looking hard enough.
One to three DSS should be from Industry and the rest should be from Academia (peerreviewed academic publications). When selecting examples of DSS from Academia,only use examples from the past ten years, unless the example is from a key article in theparticular sub-field or if it is a very close match to your proposed system. Keep in mindthat you can't just produce a copy of an existing system, so if you find a complete match,change your problem slightly. Do not use academic sources that are notpeer reviewed (such as arxiv.org) or peer reviewed sources that are not academic (suchas Wikipedia). In all cases, save a copy of the full text of the article. Do not include anysources that are based purely on an abstract of a paper. Take special care to placea citation whenever quoting or discussing ideas from a source. Simply adding a list ofreferences at the end of the paper is unacceptable. Each reference in the bibliographyshould have at least one citation somewhere in the paper. Use APA 5 or APA 6 stylecitations and references (contact the Writing Centre if in doubt).
(d) For each of the examples, describe how it compares with your planned project. Ideally, your project solves the problem in a novel way, but this is not a requirement for theproject.
(e) Describe the main design objectives for your proposed DSS. Relate the design objectivesto the targeted problem/decision process.
(f) Describe what criteria you will use to evaluate the system. Note that you are not permittedto collect data from people. For instance, conducting a usability survey for thisproject is not permitted, because that would require ethics approval before even beginningyour project. Because of this constraint you will be allowed some latitude in exactly how you plan to evaluate your project.