Resumen
This article proposes a preliminary specification for an Open Decision Support Systems (DSS) protocol that could be used to facilitate the discovery integration and operation of DSS. One important advantage to the proposed Open DSS protocol suite is that it is mapped to existing standards for Hypertext Markup Language, Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and for robots, wanderers, and spiders. Thus the Open DSS protocol suite will be compatible with protocol suites already operating on the Web. In addition to being compatible with existing protocol suites, the proposed specification is consistent with currently prevailing approaches prescribed in the literature for deploying DSS on the Web. The two-layer model is also consistent with layered architectural designs for distributed systems. The protocol is designed to be highly efficient and it is extensible in the future due to the use of HTTP headers for encoding DSS metadata. A protocol-compliant DSS can be referenced by existing text-oriented search engines and allows for the development of specialized DSS search engines. The use of specification variables enables the encoding of significant detail that can be accessed by those DSS-oriented search engines.