Real estate decision making processes and web-based applications: An integrated approach

Decision-making is a critical part of a typical real estate property valuation aimed at quantifying the market value of a property according to its qualitative characteristics. Being visualization a prominent character of this kind of problems, GIS are commonly used as a support for spatial decision analysis. This paper presents a new approach that regards decision making as a data-driven process whose tasks can be decomposed and made executable as granular applications individually. Being applications implemented on networked resources (GIS, applications, databases, and so on), this paper aims at defining a computational environment, enabled by web technologies and supporting the analyst in planning, designing and coordinating different real estate scenarios. The paper also describes an application of the computational environment which deals with the use of relevant geospatial service, user knowledge and statistical information. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010.