The goals of diviz are:
The main properties of diviz are:
It is open-source, released under the CeCILL license; the source code is hosted on its gitlab project’s page
Below you can find the main characteristics of diviz with a description of each of the features.
Based on basic algorithmic components, diviz allows to combine these elements in view of creating complex MCDA workflows or MCDA methods.
Once the workflow is designed, it can be executed on various data sets written according to the XMCDA standard. This execution is performed on distant servers via web services (each of the components is in fact proposed as a web service). See the list of XMCDA web services for further details.
Once the execution is completed, the outputs of the different elementary components are available and can be visualised in diviz. The user can then modify the input files in order to rerun the workflow, or change the existing workflow to adapt it to his needs. The history of past executions is available at any moment, which helps to compare the input and output data and tune the parameters or the workflow.
Finally, the constructed workflow can be deployed as a new web service which is then automatically made available to all the users which are employing diviz (in development).
The data exchanged between the elementary algorithmic components is conform to the XMCDA standard. XMCDA allows to express MCDA concepts through a few general XML structures.
By using the power of XSL (eXtensible Stylesheet Language) combined with a standard CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), we can easily visualise any data elements which are sent to components or produced by them. This visualisation is done in a particular pane of the diviz window and is easily accessible for all past executions.
The diviz client software is written in Java and is therefore independent of the operating system you are using.
diviz is distributed as an open source software. The various elementary MCDA components (which are the XMCDA web services) are also available as open source software bricks.
As mentionned above, diviz is a workflow manager for algorithmic components.
As such it should not be mixed up with a decision aid process workflow manager. Such a tool would model the different important steps, as well as the various roles might be involved in such decision aid process. The development of such a decision aid process manager is one of the objectives of the Decision Deck project.