A significant number of decision support systems (D
SS) are available for rural applications. However,
many of
these have low adoption rates because they have bee
n developed with little end-user engagement, limite
d ease of
use by farmers, and the identified gap in understan
ding significant problems between the DSS developer
s and
the potential end-users in the development process.
A useable development environment that prioritises
end-user
engagement can be expected to reduce the known DSS
development difficulties and to improve the develop
ment
of appropriate decision support tools. To date howe
ver few significant attempts have been made to outl
ine
sophisticated models for a design environment that
offers an adaptable and effective solution for end-
user DSS
development. This paper describes ongoing work in o
ntology construction and knowledge elicitation part
of the
development of an end-user enabled design environme
nt (EUEDE). In general the EUEDE will assist rural
business stakeholders to build their own target-rel
evant decision making tools. We describe in the fir
st instance,
the ontology for EUEDE that will allow dairy stakeh
olders to outline domain-specific decision making s
cenarios
that will lead to the building of relevant DSS.