Model management decision environment: a Web service prototype for spreadsheet models

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In the modern day, digital enterprise data and models are widely distributed. Decision-making in such distributed environments needs secure and easy access to these resources, rapid integration of decision models, and the ability to deploy these in real time. This demands a different approach for model management—one that permits decision-makers to not only share/access but also evaluate/understand models, choose appropriate ones from a collection of models, and orchestrate the execution of the model(s) in real time. In this paper, we describe an architecture that defines a service-oriented, Web service-based approach to model management. We first present a classification of stakeholders from the perspective of model management and identify the layers of modeling knowledge required for managing models. We then define a formal representation for organizing the content knowledge using a graph-based representation. We have used spreadsheet model(s) as a vehicle for explaining and demonstrating our concepts in this paper. Finally, we describe an environment (virtual business environment, VBE) that is based on a Web services architecture that would help store, retrieve, and distribute the layers of modeling knowledge to the various categories of users identified.