A system that supports technological and managerial decision making by assisting in the organization of knowledge about ill-structured, semistructured, or unstructured issues. A structured issue has a framework comprising elements and relations between them that are known and understood. Structured issues are generally ones about which an individual has considerable experiential familiarity. A decision support system (DSS) is not intended to provide support to humans about structured issues since little cognitively based decision support is generally needed for these experientially familiar situations. Artificial-intelligence based expert systems are very appropriate for these tasks.