Background:
Five years ago the Federal Institute of Hydrology (BfG) organised an international workshop on Decision Support Systems (DSS) related to water management in Europe: http://elise.bafg.de/?3469 . A lot of progress in this field has been achieved, also taking into account cross sectoral and cross bordering aspects, especially since the EU WFD came into force, but also as a consequence of recent highwater events and other tasks. In Germany the Federal Ministry of Research and Education (BMBF) funded different projects working on this topic. But still the use of DSS and related methological aspects have to be brought forward from reasearch to daily planning practice.
For that reason in this year’s workshop we want to focus on user and developer experiences concerning methodological, operational and organisational aspects of decision support systems for integrated river basin management.

The idea of the workshop is not to present mere project results, but condensing experiences and ideas in a creative and open workshop atmosphere.
We want to adress these key issues to the workshop:

User experiences:

• Does the DSS address your management tasks with the right scope and scale?
• How do you embedd “your” DSS in organisational structures and decision making processes
• How is the knowledge, lifecycle management and the maintenance of a DSS organised in your administrational environment?
• Is the DSS in use generally accepted or even part of legal planning procedures?
• …(to be added)

Developer experiences:

• Which methodologies for model integration have been proven by themselves?
• Which software engineering aspects of model integration are important to discuss for further developments
• Which features of User Interface design for policy support with complex scientific applications would you prefer to delvelop in future?
• Tell about the DSS development process: goals, roles, conflicts, methodology, knowledge engineering
• ….((to be added)

We are heading for a list of „to do’s and not to do’s“ to bring the idea of what a DSS can be and has to deliver to planning processes a step forward (way of model-integration, degree of building up user interfaces, making DSS more familiar in formal decision procedures etc.).

	organisational/location