IJCSI International Journal of Computer Science Issues, Vol. 7, Issue 2, No 1, March 2010 www.IJCSI.org 42 ongoing project [9]. In similar approach, Cheung et al. [14] made use of Web-based and database to manipulate data on current ongoing project by plotting graph to compare and measure performances. Meanwhile, data mining approach is integrated with DSS model to control and analyse cost of a project in order to determine project performances, predict trends and support in decisionmaking [18]. 

## 5. Current Issues

The exponential growth of unstructured information lead to the necessity of devising strategies to improve and enhance individual and organizational decision-making by associating with automated tool in decision systems [75]. 

It is one of the current research challenges in DSS since the standard tools designed for structured data analysis. Traditional DSS lack of capability to confront with dynamics and ill-defined data. Current existing decision support tools in construction tendering processes are focused on quantitative data processing where the systems are specifically analyses factual values. Quantitative system could not directly scrutinize exact problem structure from text. According to Froelich & Ananyan [76], current challenges in decision-making requires comprehensive analysis of large volumes of both structured and unstructured data. Issuing free text documents either in paper or electronic forms (i.e contracts, policies, catalogues, certificates, transcripts, financial statements, surveys, medical reports) are inevitable in daily business for auditing, authentication, information exchange and recording purposes [38, 77-79]. A survey conducted by Building Cost Information Services (BCIS) on [80] showed that despite of active electronic tendering practices, document in hard copy is still required at the end of the process. It is because users prefer final documentation in black and white copy. Furthermore, there are potential limitations in web-based implementation as it is designed to solve specific application in which human effort is needed to maintain and modify the changes either interface or process with sufficient programming skills. The dominant use of paper-based approach is also due to the fact that Web-based applications do not meet the technological demands of end users to improve the whole processes [77, 81]. Supporting documents or attachments or appendices are essential in order to verify and acknowledge the information provided in the application. For example in Web-based tendering processes, client side form validation with Javascript approach is proposed to validate the sufficiency of the supporting documents attached [38]. 

Despite of the existing Web-based application, current approach requires users to manually go through the documents, check and evaluate the consistency of information in these documents with the information provided either in the compulsory documents or database. 

Current web-based tendering processes faces limitation in verifying tender documents in which tender documents need to be reviewed through computer monitors or in paper-based format [43, 47]. Hence, a framework is necessary to automatically detect outlier specification in terms of syntactic and semantic contents of supporting documents with respect to contextual application. 

## 6. Conclusion

Traditional tendering processes in construction industry are complex and fragmented. This paper summarizes current practices of general tendering processes around the world such as Unites States, Europe, Middle East and Asia. Related researches on DSS in tendering processes have been successfully reviews in this paper. The benefit of decision support has attracted various researchers to implement the system in tendering. Despite efforts to integrate and transform the whole construction tendering processes into electronic or digital form by using Webbased Technology, the use of unstructured documents either in hard copy or digital could not be neglected in daily business processes especially for recording, authentication and information exchange purposes. Large volumes of unstructured tender documents need to be analysed. It is the biggest challenge to automate the analysis using computerised tools. It becomes harder when to automatically convert unstructured data to structured format data for input in decision-making processes. 

The need to extract and represent information in machinereadable formats becomes obvious. In order to automate the tendering processes, integrating ontology in DSS model seems to be a promising approach. We proposed a framework of ontological-based extraction for decision support system in order to improve tender assessment process. For electronic government, as far as we are concern, none of the research has been found to use ontological modelling as part of decision support components. For the future research, we intend to construct domain ontology for tendering processes using standard methodology for ontology building. The ontology will represent rule-based for supporting decision-making process. 