Integration of context-information to support spatial decision systems

Spatial decision making often requires the consideration of huge datasets from a great variety of sectors. For the achievement of decision that are accepted by as many actors as possible it is indispensable to consider all relevant fields, and contexts. However, if the goal of a project is ill defined or broadly scoped, it can be hard to identify all relevant actors and overview whether their different goals, perceptions and ideas of how a place, a landscape, a village or city should develop in the future, can be integrated. Actors recognize problems necessarily within their specific context. The idea of a holistic approach to decision making is to consider possibly all relevant contexts, in which a spatial problem is embedded. This should lead to qualitatively high and sustainable decisions because the ignorance of specific contextual information can lead to unsatisfying, in the worst case harmful results. The problem as such is not new, but this paper argues not from a perspective of human communication. It raises the question, whether applications can support a holistic approach in spatial decision making by extending decision systems with functionalities to integrate context-information automatically.