A metalanguage design for sessions with group decision support systems

This paper proposes a metalanguage for representing communication among participants in a session of a group decision support system (GDSS). Such a vehicle can be used for setting standards and designing specific user interfaces with GDSS. Three different roles of participants are identified: chairperson, chauffeur and regular participant. The tasks and activities of each role are analyzed. Based on the analysis, communications requirements are derived. The requirements lead to a design of a metalanguage consisting of 15 different commands. The paper concludes by displaying the structure and syntax of each command. The work described here is conceptual and could be considered as a proposal for GDSS language design.