Map maker’s guide: a decision support system for interpolation, aggregation, and disaggregation : technical documentation

This report documents a decision support system (DSS) that has been developed to assist environmental researchers in selecting interpolation, aggregation, and disaggregation methods. The DSS has been implemented as a web-application. This facilitates updating and makes the DSS generally accessible. The DSS asks the user several questions. The answers are compared with those given by experts. The degree of similarity between both sets of answers is used to assign suitability scores to a huge set of interpolation, aggregation, and disaggregation methods stored in a database. These methods are ranked from most to least suitable and presented to the user in a dynamic table. The user can compare recommended methods (backgrounds, available software, literature, performance) and evaluate dynamically which methods would have been recommended if deferent answers had been given (what-if analysis)