The paper describes conception and prototypical design of a decision-support server for acute abdominal pain. A user survey was initiated in three surgical departments to assess the user requirements concerning formal decision-aids. The results of this survey are presented. For scoring systems a work-up to separate terminological information from structure is described. The terminology is separately stored in a data dictionary and the structure in the knowledge base. This procedure enables a reuse of terminology for documentation and decision-support. The whole system covers a decision-support server written in C++ with underlying data dictionary and knowledge base, a documentation module written in Java and a Corba middleware (ORBacus 3.1) that establishes a connection via internet.