An online decision support system for assessing soil health has been developed under the Soil Management Assessment Framework (SMAF) of Andrews et al. (2004) using productivity as management goal for which nutrient cycling, physical stability and support, water relations, resistance and resilience were chosen as supporting soil functions. Scoring of all the data was done in standardized linear scoring function (Andrews et al., 2002) where, ‘more is better’, ‘less is better’, and ‘optimum is better’ approach was used. Each of the indicators was divided into three classes namely, Class – I, Class – II and Class – III with an assigned mark of 0.9, 0.7 and 0.4, respectively. The soil health index (SHI) was calculated by the following equation:

SHI = ∑ W_i M_i,

Where, W_i is the weight of the indicator and M_i is the mark of the indicator classes.

Here the assumption is that higher index scores mean better soil health or greater performance of soil function. The SHI is rated as:<0.25, 0.25-0.50, 0.50-0.70, 0.70-0.90 and >0.90 for interpreting the health of soil as very poor, poor, good, very good and excellent, respectively. The introduction of the values of soil health parameters in the on-line decision support system will automatically calculate the soil health index and interpret the overall health of the soil under consideration. The online decision support system has been developed for the soils under different agro-ecological regions of India. It is mandatory to analyze at least most sensitive soil parameters (*) under productivity management goal for calculation of SHI by this decision support system.