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Excerpt from Sibyl: A Tool for Managing Group Decision Rationale <p>There are two major motivations underlying sibyl: knowledge sharing and qualitative decision support. These motivations also help us delimit the domain of application for sibyl. Sibyl is useful in the situations, such as in design decisions, where the following motivations exist. <p>Knowledge Sharing: Decision making usually involves gathering and relating pieces of knowledge relevant to evaluating alternatives along some criteria. Such knowledge, once explicitly represented, can be shared by others in several ways. In a group decision making, explicitly represented knowledge allows people to augment the knowledge by bringing in additional knowledge, supporting claims, denying claims, or qualifications. We describe below how sibyl allows this mode of knowledge sharing. Another mode of knowledge sharing takes place across groups. The knowledge represented as a part of a decision process is often useful to Others making similar decisions. Past decisions can tell us not only the factual information that we need but also the ways that a decision can be structured. The ways that different goals can be achieved, or the attributes against which alternatives should be evaluated. Furthermore, past decisions provide the additional knowledge of whether the approach they took were successful or not. Yet an0ther way of sharing knowledge is within a group across time. The records of how decisions were made serve as documents, which in turn serve as a basis for justification and learning. Sibyl also helps sharing knowledge through these modes, which we discuss only briey when describing its services. <p>About the Publisher <p>Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com <p>This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whi