bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Digital Abyss in Zimbabwe
Authors: Jameson Jill
Published: February 2011

Just as refugees fleeing to escape Zimbabwe have struggled to cross the crocodile-hungry waters of the Limpopo, so are Zimbabweans battling to find ways to traverse the abyss of a digital divide affecting their country. In 2008-09, Zimbabwe was rated third worst in the world for its national information communications technology (ICT) capability by the World Economic Forum, being ranked at 132/134 nations on the global ICT ‘networked readiness index’. Digital divide issues, including severe deficits in access to new technologies facing this small Sub-Saharan country, are therefore acute. In terms of global power relations involving ICT capability, Zimbabwe has little influence in any world ranking of nations. A history of oppression, economic collapse, mismanagement, poverty, disease, corruption, discrimination, public sector breakdown and population loss has rendered the country almost powerless in ICT terms. Applying a critical social theory methodology and drawing on Freirean conceptions of critical pedagogy to promote emancipation through equal access to e-learning, this chapter is written in two parts. In the first place, it analyzes grim national statistics relating to education and to the digital divide in Zimbabwe, situating these in the wider context of Africa; in the second part, the chapter applies this information in a practical fictional setting to imagine life through the eyes of an average Zimbabwean male farm worker called Themba, recounting through narrative an example of the impact on one person’s life that could result from, firstly, a complete lack of educational and ICT resources for adults in a rural farming situation and, secondly, new opportunities as a migrant to become engaged with adult and higher education, including ICT training and facilities. Access to education, to book publications, to ICT facilities, in dialogue with others during a long process of conscientization, are seen to open up democratising and liberating opportunities for Themba in South Africa. The powerful transformation that takes place Themba’s life and propels him towards many achievements as an e-learning teacher is inspired by Freire’s critical pedagogy: it provides a message of hope in an otherwise exceptionally bleak educational and technological situation, given the current difficult socio-economic and political situation that has resulted in a digital abyss in Zimbabwe.
Economic Growth, Technical Progress and Labor Productivity
Authors: Herscovici Alain
Published: February 2011

The debate on deindustrialization assumes that domestic industry is a leading sector and produces positive externalities for the whole economy. This paper will partially refute this. Since the early 1990’s, most developed and emerging economies have been subjected to two paradoxes: the paradox of Solow, which calls into question the relationship between ICT investment and productivity gains, and the paradox of Gordon, showing that productivity gains in the ICT sector do not propagate to all other sectors. These paradoxes lead one to question the linear nature of the kaldorian cumulative mechanisms. Following both a theoretical and an empirical approach, such relationships are analyzed from the viewpoint of the various models of unbalanced growth built by Baumol. The author will highlight the limits of such models and provide elements for an alternative explanation. Ultimately, the real problem is to investigate the economic nature and the role that services and forms of intangible capital play in the new dynamic of growth.
Research and Output Management in Digital Era
Authors: Sekhwela M. B. M.
Published: February 2011

The institutional commitment to research that was hitherto left to individual researchers and few research centres came with the University Strategy, ‘Shape Our Future’. The Strategy, with clear mission and vision of research excellence, provided support for the development of a policy framework, subsequent research, output management infrastructure, and associated processes. This paper has reviewed these developments and emerging challenges posed by resource intensive paper based processes that need to be addressed inline with increasing aspirations for digital scholarship. Efforts to address these challenges are largely to reduce intensity of resource use inline with digital scholarship aspirations that embrace information and communication technology (ICT). However, the dynamism of developments and innovations in ICTs are characterized by high frequency of system obsolesce that could be costly to emerging resource poor Universities, particularly proprietary systems. This leads to the need of embracing the use of open source ware by investing in human resource development for capacity building and sustenance of digital scholarship.
Higher-Order Mobile Agents for Controlling Intelligent Robots
Authors: Kambayashi Yasushi , Takimoto Munehiro
Published: February 2011

This paper presents a framework for controlling intelligent robots connected by the Internet. This framework provides novel methods to control coordinated systems using higher-order mobile agents. Higher-order mobile agents are hierarchically structured agents that can contain other mobile agents. By using higher-order mobile agents, intelligent robots in action can acquire new functionalities dynamically as well as exchange their roles with other colleague robots. The higher-order property of the mobile agents enables them to be organized hierarchically and dynamically. In addition to these advantages, higher-order mobile agents require minimum communication. They only need connection to be established when they perform migration.
The WASP Framework
Authors: Biskup Thomas , Gomex Jorge Marx , Rautenstrauch Claus
Published: February 2011

Currently, we face a major gap between the reality of the Web — a disjoined and tangled mass of loosely coupled information resources — and the vision for the Web — a tightly integrated and openly structured information network with machine-readable data that allows autonomous agencies to create new applications empowered by this wealth of information. Current research shows that we can hope to achieve this goal, but there are many obstacles left to be mastered. We propose a framework to allow researchers and developers to choose the level of detail, the type of technologies, and the extent of computing power they want to utilize for their proposed solutions. We focus on a flexible abstraction layer, pattern-oriented architecture, and open interfaces to build on the successful foundations of the Web: ease of use, flexibility, and almost unlimited expression power. Agents are the central paradigm for software development using this architecture.
A Model for Monitoring and Enforcing Online Auction Ethics
Authors: Wang Shouhong , Kao Diana
Published: February 2011

The online auction has become an important form of e-commerce. Although using a different mode for conducting auction activities, online auctions should abide by the same code of ethics outlined in the face-to-face auction environment. Yet, ethics-related issues for online auctions have not been fully discussed in the current literature. The unique features of online auctions present an opportunity to address how ethical conduct could be supported, monitored, and enforced in an online auction environment. With technology being the backbone of the online auction, information systems appear to be a useful tool in facilitating ethics enforcement. This article summarizes ethics-related issues that are particularly relevant in online auctions, and recommends a code of ethics that could be applied to online auctions. Based on this set of ethics, this article proposes a model for an information system that will support and enhance ethical conduct in an online auction environment.
Mining Matrix Pattern from Mobile Users
Authors: Goh John , Taniar David
Published: February 2011

Mobile user data mining is about extracting knowledge from raw data collected from mobile users. There have been a few approaches developed, such as frequency pattern (Goh & Taniar, 2004), group pattern (Lim, Wang, Ong, et al., 2003; Wang, Lim, & Hwang, 2003), parallel pattern (Goh & Taniar, 2005) and location dependent mobile user data mining (Goh & Taniar, 2004). Previously proposed methods share the common drawbacks of costly resources that have to be spent in identifying the location of the mobile node and constant updating of the location information. The proposed method aims to address this issue by using the location dependent approach for mobile user data mining. Matrix pattern looks at the mobile nodes from the point of view of a particular fixed location rather than constantly following the mobile node itself. This can be done by using sparse matrix to map the physical location and use the matrix itself for the rest of mining process, rather than identifying the real coordinates of the mobile users. This allows performance efficiency with slight sacrifice in accuracy. As the mobile nodes visit along the mapped physical area, the matrix will be marked and used to perform mobile user data mining. The proposed method further extends itself from a single layer matrix to a multi-layer matrix in order to accommodate mining in different contexts, such as mining the relationship between the theme of food and fashion within a geographical area, thus making it more robust and flexible. The performance and evaluation shows that the proposed method can be used for mobile user data mining.
An Agent-Based Framework for Emergent Process Management
Authors: Debenham John
Published: February 2011

Emergent processes are business processes whose execution is determined by the prior knowledge of the agents involved and by the knowledge that emerges during a process instance. The amount of process knowledge that is relevant to a knowledge-driven process can be enormous and may include common-sense knowledge. If a process’ knowledge cannot be represented feasibly, then that process cannot be managed, although its execution may be supported partially. In an e-market domain, the majority of transactions, including trading orders and requests for advice and information, are knowledge-driven processes for which the knowledge base is the Internet; therefore, representing the knowledge is not at issue. Multiagent systems are an established platform for managing complex business processes. What is needed for emergent process management is an intelligent agent that is driven not by a process goal but by an inflow of knowledge, where each chunk of knowledge may be uncertain. These agents should assess the extent to which they choose to believe that the information is correct, and thus, they require an inference mechanism that can cope with information of differing integrity.
Importance of Interface Agent Characteristics from End-User Perspective
Authors: Serenko Alexander
Published: February 2011

This article reports on an empirical investigation of user perceptions of the importance of several characteristics of interface agents. Interface agents are software entities that are incorporated into various computer applications, including electronic mail systems. As evidenced by the growing body of empirical studies and the increasing number of interface agent-based applications on the software market, there is a strong need for the development of this technology. According to a meta-review of agent-related literature by Dehn and van Mulken (2000), there are several characteristics of interface agents that require special attention from agent developers. However, prior to this study, the importance of these characteristics from the end-user perspective remained unclear. In order to identify the significance of these characteristics, a group of actual users of an e-mail interface agent was surveyed. The results indicate that information accuracy and the degree of the usefulness of an agent are the most salient factors, followed by user comfortability with an agent, the extent of user enjoyment, and visual attractiveness of an agent. The implications of the findings for both theory and practice are discussed.
VAQoS
Authors: Serhani M. A. , Dssouli R. , Sahraoui H. , Benharref A. , Badidi M. E.
Published: February 2011

During the last few years, Value Added Web Services (VAWS) are increasingly becoming a hot issue in both research and industry. With the abundance of VAWS providers, Quality of Service (QoS) is a key factor to allow potential clients to differentiate between providers. In this paper, we propose a new architecture, called VAQoS, for managing and assuring QoS provision for VAWS. This architecture performs management of QoS by: (1) allowing providers to extend the service description with QoS-centered annotations, (2) including a validation process that enables providers to test their service interfaces as well as the level of QoS they can provide prior to publishing the service, (3) allowing clients to express their required functionalities with QoS requirements; (4) providing support for QoS negotiation between clients and providers, (5) allowing monitoring of the agreed QoS between clients and providers, and therefore, detecting any QoS violation; (6) providing an application programming interface that shields the application of the provider and client from the complexity of managing QoS specification, QoS publication, and QoS discovery. A first prototype of VAQoS is developed.
Secure Identity Management in a Service-Based E-Learning Environment
Authors: Vossen Gottfried , Westerkamp Peter
Published: February 2011

E-learning environments and their system functionalities resemble one another to a large extent. Recent standardization efforts in e-learning concentrate on the reuse of learning material, but not on the reuse of application or system functionalities. The LearnServe system under development at the University of Muenster builds on the assumption that a typical learning system is a collection of activities or processes that interact with learners and suitably chosen content, the latter in the form of Learning Objects. This enables us to divide the main functionality of an e-learning system into a number of stand-alone applications or services. The realization of these applications based on the emerging technical paradigm of Web services then renders a wide reuse of functionality possible, thereby giving learners a higher flexibility of choosing content and functionalities to be included in their learning environment. In such a scenario, it must, however, be possible to maintain user identity and data across service and server boundaries. This paper presents an architecture for implementing user authentication and the manipulation of user data across several Web services. In particular, it demonstrates how to exploit the SPML and SAML standards so that cross-domain single sign-on can be offered to the users of a service-based learning environment. The paper also discusses how this is being integrated into LearnServe.
Supporting Text Retrieval by Typographical Term Weighting
Authors: Werner Lars , Böttcher Stefan
Published: February 2011

Text documents stored in information systems usually consist of more information than the pure concatenation of words, i.e., they also contain typographic information. Because conventional text retrieval methods evaluate only the word frequency, they miss the in-formation provided by typography, e.g., regarding the importance of certain terms. In order to overcome this weakness, we present an approach which uses the typographical information of text documents and show how this improves the efficiency of text retrieval methods. Our approach uses weighting of typographic information in addition to term frequencies for separating relevant information in text documents from the noise. We have evaluated our approach on the basis of automated text classification algorithms. The results show that our weighting approach achieves very competitive classification results using at most 30% of the terms used by conventional approaches, which makes our approach significantly more efficient.
Improving Mobile Web Navigation Using N-Grams Prediction Models
Authors: Fu Yongjian , Paul Hironmoy , Shetty Namita
Published: February 2011

In this article, we propose to use N-gram models for improving Web navigation for mo-bile users. N-gram models are built from Web server logs to learn navigation patterns of mobile users. They are used as prediction models in an existing algorithm which improves mobile Web navigation by recommending shortcuts. Our experiments on two real data sets show that N-gram models are as effective as other more complex models in improving mobile Web navigation.
Philosophical Foundations of Information Modeling
Authors: Artz John M.
Published: February 2011

This article attempts to provide some philosophical grounding for the practice of information modeling by introducing four key metaphysical concepts that are at the heart of information modeling. These are the concept of identity, the problem of universals, teleology, and the correspondence vs. coherence views of truth. These concepts are first explained and then their relevance to information modeling is discussed. Implications for the practice of information modeling and research in information modeling are also addressed.
Evaluating E-commerce Trust Using Fuzzy Logic
Authors: Meziane Farid , Nefti Samia
Published: February 2011

Trust is widely recognized as an essential factor for the continual development of business to customer electronic commerce (B2C EC). Many trust models have been developed, however, most are subjective and do not take into account the vagueness and ambiguity of EC trust and the customers’ intuitions and experience when conducting online transactions. In this article, we develop a fuzzy trust model using fuzzy reasoning to evaluate EC trust. This trust model is based on the information customers expect to find on an EC Website and is shown to increase customers trust towards online merchants. We argue that fuzzy logic is suitable for trust evaluation as it takes into account the uncertainties within e-commerce data and like human relationships; it is often expressed by linguistics terms rather then numerical values. The evaluation of the proposed model will be illustrated using two case studies and a comparison with two evaluation models was conducted to emphasise the importance of using fuzzy logic.
EnOntoModel
Authors: Tun Nwe Ni , Tojo Satoshi
Published: February 2011

Ontologies are intended to facilitate semantic interoperability among distributed and intelligent information systems where diverse software components, computing devices, knowledge, and data, are involved. Since a single global ontology is no longer sufficient to support a variety of tasks performed on differently conceptualized knowledge, ontologies have proliferated in multiple forms of heterogeneity even for the same domain, and such ontologies are called heterogeneous ontologies. For interoperating among information systems through heterogeneous ontologies, an important step in handling semantic heterogeneity should be the attempt to enrich (and clarify) the semantics of concepts in ontologies. In this article, a conceptual model (called EnOntoModel) of semantically-enriched ontologies is proposed by applying three philosophical notions: identity, rigidity, and dependency. As for the advantages of EnOntoModel, the conceptual analysis of enriched ontologies and efficient matching between them are presented.
Social Structure Based Design Patterns for Agent-Oriented Software Engineering
Authors: Kolp Manuel , Faulkner Stéphane , Wautelet Yves
Published: February 2011

Multi-agent systems (MAS) architectures are gaining popularity over traditional ones for building open, distributed, and evolving software required by today’s corporate IT applications such as e-business systems, Web services, or enterprise knowledge bases. Since the fundamental concepts of multi-agent systems are social and intentional rather than object, functional, or implementation-oriented, the design of MAS architectures can be eased by using social patterns. They are detailed agent-oriented design idioms to describe MAS architectures composed of autonomous agents that interact and coordinate to achieve their intentions, like actors in human organizations. This article presents social patterns and focuses on a framework aimed to gain insight into these patterns. The framework can be integrated into agent-oriented software engineering methodologies used to build MAS. We consider the Broker social pattern to illustrate the framework. An overview of the mapping from system architectural design (through organizational architectural styles), to system detailed design (through social patterns), is presented with a data integration case study. The automation of creating design patterns is also discussed.
Supporting Structured Group Decision Making Through System-Directed User Guidance
Authors: Lagroue III Harold J.
Published: February 2011

This article addresses an area which holds considerable promise for enhancing the effective utilization of advanced information technologies: the feasibility of using system-directed multi-modal user support for facilitating users of advanced information technologies. An application for automating the information technology facilitation process is used to compare group decision-making effectiveness of human-facilitated groups with groups using virtual facilitation in an experiment employing auditors, accountants, and IT security professionals as participants. The results of the experiment are presented and possible avenues for future research studies are suggested.
Mining E-Mail Messages
Authors: van der Aalst Wil M.P. , Nikolov Andriy
Published: February 2011

Increasingly information systems log historic information in a systematic way. Workflow management systems, but also ERP, CRM, SCM, and B2B systems often provide a so-called “event log” (i.e., a log recording the execution of activities). Thus far, process mining has been mainly focusing on structured event logs resulting in powerful analysis techniques and tools for discovering process, control, data, organizational, and social structures from event logs. Unfortunately, many work processes are not supported by systems providing structured logs. Instead, very basic tools such as text editors, spreadsheets, and e-mail are used. This article explores the application of process mining to e-mail (i.e., unstructured or semi-structured e-mail messages are converted into event logs suitable for application of process mining tools). This article presents the tool EMailAnalyzer, embedded in the ProM process mining framework, which analyzes and transforms e-mail messages to a format that allows for analysis using our process mining techniques. The main innovative aspect of this work is that, unlike most other work in this area, our analysis is not restricted to social network analysis. Based on e-mail logs, we can also discover interaction patterns and processes.
A Hybrid Model for Service Selection in Semantic Web Service Composition
Authors: Kumar Sandeep , Mishra R.B.
Published: February 2011

One of the most important aspects of semantic web service composition process is the selection of most appropriate semantic web service. The Quality of Service (QoS) and cognitive parameters can be a good basis for this selection process. In this paper, we have presented a hybrid selection model for the selection of semantic web services based on their QoS and cognitive parameters. The presented model provides a new approach of measuring the QoS parameters in an accurate way and provides a completely novel and formalized measurement of different cognitive parameters.
Association Analysis of Alumni Giving
Authors: Hashemi Ray R. , Le Blanc Louis A. , Bahrami Azita A. , Bahar Mahmood , Traywick Bryan
Published: February 2011

A large sample (initially 33,000 cases representing a ten percent trial) of university alumni giving records for a large public university in the southwestern United States is analyzed by Formal Concept Analysis. This likely represents the initial attempt to perform analysis of such data by means of a machine learning technique. The variables employed include the gift amount to the university foundation as well as traditional demographic variables such as year of graduation, gender, ethnicity, marital status, etc. The foundation serves as one of the institution’s non-profit, fund-raising organizations. It pursues substantial gifts that are designated for the educational or leadership programs of the giver’s choice. Although they process gifts of all sizes, the foundation’s focus is on major gifts and endowments. Association Analysis of the given dataset is a two-step process. In the first step, FCA is applied to identify concepts and their relationships and in the second step, the association rules are defined for each concept. The hypothesis examined in this paper is that the generosity of alumni toward his/her alma mater can be predicted using association rules obtained by applying the Formal Concept Analysis approach.
Using Organizational Semiotics and Conceptual Graphs in a Two-Step Method for Knowledge Management Process Improvement Measurement
Authors: Schiffel Jeffrey A.
Published: February 2011

The semantic normal forms of organizational semiotics extract structures from natural language texts that may be stored electronically. In themselves, the SNFs are only canonic descriptions of the patterns of behavior observed in a culture. Conceptual graphs and dataflow graphs, their dynamic variety, provide means to reason over propositions in first order logics. Conceptual graphs, however, do not of themselves capture the ontological entities needed for such reasoning. The culture of an organization contains natural language entities that can be extracted for use in knowledge representation and reasoning. Together in a rigorous, two-step process, ontology charting from organizational semiotics and dataflow graphs from knowledge engineering provide a means to extract entities of interest from a subject domain such as the culture of organizations and then to represent these entities in formal logic reasoning. This paper presents this process, and concludes with an example of how process improvement in an IT organization may be measured in this two-step process.
Building Customized Search Engines
Authors: Chua Cecil Eng Huang , Chiang Roger H.L. , Storey Veda C.
Published: February 2011

Search engines are essential, ubiquitous tools for seeking information from the Internet. Prior research has also demonstrated that combining features of separate search engines often improves retrieval performance. However, such feature combination is often difficult, because developers don’t consider other developers when building their software. To facilitate the development of search engines, we propose a customized search engine approach to integrating appropriate components from multiple search engines. This article presents an interoperability architecture for building customized search engines. To achieve this, authors analyze existing search engines and decompose them into self-contained components that are classified into six categories. The Automated Software Development Environment for Information Retrieval (ASDEIR) was developed as the prototype of the proposed interoperability architecture to test its feasibility, robustness, and usefulness. ASDEIR incorporates intelligent features that detect and attempt to resolve conflicts between components.
OntoClippy
Authors: Dahlem Nikolai
Published: February 2011

In this article, the author describes OntoClippy, a tool-supported methodology for the user-friendly design and creation of ontologies. Existing ontology design methodologies and tools are targeted at experts and not suitable for users without a background in formal logic. Therefore, this research develops a methodology and a supporting tool to facilitate the acceptance of ontologies by a wider audience. In this article, the author positions the approach with respect to the current state of the art, formulates the basic principles of the methodology, presents its formal grounding, and describes its phases in detail. To demonstrate the viability of our approach, the author performs a comparative evaluation. The experiment is described, as well as real-world applications of the approach.
Open Infrastructure for a Nationwide Emergency Services Network
Authors: Gaynor Mark , Brander Scott , Pearce Alan , Post Ken
Published: February 2011

The article suggests and supports a public policy in which the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) should seize a unique opportunity to resolve some of the nation’s critical communications problems in times of crises with the allocation of a portion of the spectrum at 700 MHz for the deployment of a nationwide interoperable emergency broadband wireless network built by a public-private partnership. It then presents a convincing theoretical model that advocates that an open and/or neutral, as opposed to a closed, network will add greater efficiency, greater choice, while advancing public safety along with the deployment of new and valuable technologies, applications and services.
Collaborative Command and Control Practice
Authors: Trnka Jiri , Johansson Björn
Published: February 2011

This article describes a study, which aimed to document the work practice of a team of commanders responding to an emergency, and to identify areas and activities, that may be enhanced by the use of command and control tools. The study was based on a ‘human-in-the-loop’ simulation with emergency management commanders as articipants. Communication analyses – episodic analysis, socio-metric status and communication roles – were used to assess coordination among the commanders. The results indicate that the commanders used informal arrangements within the established command and control structures to perform various informal functions and take on diverse communication roles across organizational and domain boundaries. Cross-domain and cross-organizational knowledge was the most important enabler of this type of coordination. General tools providing methods and aids to indicate and support informal functions and communication roles were identified as absent.
Emergency Messaging to General Public via Public Wireless Networks
Authors: Pau L-F , Simonsen P.
Published: February 2011

Warnings to the broad population in an emergency situation, irrespective of location and condition, is a public policy responsibility. Public wireless networks offer now the opportunity to deliver emergency warnings in this way with explanations, because in many countries the mobile penetration rates and coverage are higher than any other access form. The article summarizes the analysis of the selection process between Short messaging services (SMS) and Cell Broadcast (CB) messaging in the context of Denmark based on end user requirements, stakeholder roles and case-based analysis. It demonstrates the many technical, cost-benefit and other tradeoffs needed in supporting the population now with a dependable and wide-spread technology. This research is the basis for a national policy.
Knowledge Management in Support of Crisis Response
Authors: Jennex Murray E. , Raman Murali
Published: February 2011

Most organizations face difficult challenges in managing knowledge for crisis response, but it is crucial for response effectiveness that such challenges be overcome. Organizational members must share the knowledge needed to plan for emergencies. They also must be able during an emergency to access relevant plans and communicate about their responses to it. This article examines the role and relevance of knowledge management (and knowledge management systems therein) in support of crisis response. We begin by discussing what knowledge management and crisis response mean. We move on to suggest why crisis response efforts within an organizational context, might benefit from knowledge management initiatives. Specific examples of how knowledge management efforts have supported crisis response in the past are then presented. We end by offering researchers with some suggestions for future research work in light of this subject domain.
An Approach for E-Service Design using Enterprise Models
Authors: Henkel Martin , Johannesson Paul , Perjons Erik
Published: February 2011

Organisations demand new business models for value creation and innovation that require collaboration with customers and vendors in agile and flexible networks. To realise such networks, organisations are embracing service oriented models and architectures using e-services for business communication. A major issue for a service oriented organisation is to design and offer e-services that are adapted to the needs, wants, and requirements of customers and vendors. This is a challenging task as different customer groups and vendors will have different requirements, which may vary over time, resulting in a large number of e-services. In this paper, the authors suggest enterprise models as being adequate instruments for design and maintenance of e-services. More specifically; an approach for designing e-services based on value and goal models, which will ensure that the constructed e-services will satisfy the needs and wants of customers. A project from the Swedish health care sector is used to demonstrate and evaluate the proposed approach.
Administering the Semantic Web
Authors: Thuraisingham Bhavani , Tsybulnik Natasha , Alam Ashraful
Published: February 2011

The Semantic Web is essentially a collection of technologies to support machine-understandable Web pages as well as Information Interoperability. There has been much progress made on the Semantic Web, including standards for eXtensible Markup Language, Resource Description Framework, and Ontologies. However, administration policies and techniques for enforcing them have received little attention. These policies include policies for security, privacy, data quality, integrity, trust, and timely information processing. This article discusses administration policies for the Semantic Web as well as techniques for enforcing them. In particular, we will discuss an approach for ensuring confidentiality, privacy, and trust for the Semantic Web. We will also discuss the inference and privacy problems within the context of administration policies.
Privacy and Security in the Age of Electronic Customer Relationship Management
Authors: Romano Jr. Nicholas C. , Fjermestad Jerry
Published: February 2011

This article presents a value exchange model of privacy and security for electronic customer relationship management within an electronic commerce environment. Enterprises and customers must carefully manage these new virtual relationships in order to ensure that they both derive value from them and minimize unintended consequences that result from the concomitant exchange of personal information that occurs in e-commerce. Based upon a customer’s requirements of privacy and an enterprise requirement to establish markets and sell goods and services, there is a value exchange relationship. The model is an integration of the customer sphere of privacy, sphere of security, and privacy/security sphere of implementation.
Privacy-Preserving Clustering to Uphold Business Collaboration
Authors: Oliveira Stanley R.M. , Zaïane Osmar R.
Published: February 2011

While the sharing of data is known to be beneficial in data mining applications and widely acknowledged as advantageous in business, this information sharing can become controversial and thwarted by privacy regulations and other privacy concerns. Data clustering for instance could be more accurate if more information is available, hence the data sharing. Any solution needs to balance the clustering requirements and the privacy issues. Rather than simply hindering data owners from sharing information for data analysis, a solution could be designed to meet privacy requirements and guarantee valid data clustering results. To achieve this dual goal, this article introduces a method for privacy-preserving clustering called dimensionality reduction-based transformation (DRBT). This method relies on the intuition behind random projection to protect the underlying attribute values subjected to cluster analysis. It is shown analytically and empirically that transforming a dataset using DRBT, a data owner can achieve privacy preservation and get accurate clustering with little overhead of communication cost. Such a method presents the following advantages: it is independent of distance-based clustering algorithms, it has a sound mathematical foundation, and it does not require CPU-intensive operations.
Ignorance is Bliss
Authors: Van Dyke Thomas P.
Published: February 2011

Studies have shown that people claim that privacy matters to them but then they often do things while browsing that are risky in terms of privacy. The seeming inconsistency between professed privacy concerns and risky behavior on the Internet may be more a consequence of ignorance rather than irrationality. It is possible that many people simply don’t understand the technologies, risks, and regulations related to privacy and information gathering on the Web. In this study, we conducted an experiment to determine the answer to the following question: If people understood the risks and technology, would that knowledge alter their level of privacy concern and their preferences concerning e-commerce Web site personalization? Results indicate that increased awareness of information gathering technology resulted in significantly higher levels of privacy concern and significantly reduced preferences for Web site personalization. Implications of the findings are discussed.
Towards Autonomous User Privacy Control
Authors: Eldin Amr Ali , Wagenaar Rene
Published: February 2011

In this article, we propose a consent decision-making mechanism, ShEM, which allows users to exert automatic and manual control over their private information. An enhanced fuzzy logic approach was developed for the automatic decision-making process. The proposed mechanism has been prototyped and integrated in a UMTS location-based services testbed on a university campus. Users have experienced the services in real time. A survey of users’ responses on the privacy functionality has been carried out and analyzed as well. Users’ response on the privacy functionality was positive. Additionally, results obtained showed that a combination of both manual and automatic privacy control modes in one approa
A Secure and Trustful E-Ordering Architecture (TOES) for Small and Medium Size Enterprises (SEMs)
Authors: Papastergiou Spyridon , Polemi Despina
Published: February 2011

Although various European Union (EU) directives have established the proper legal framework for the provision of a trustful, legally accepted cross border transaction via electronic means, the consumers are still hesitant to use e-commerce. Lack of confidence with regard to the protection of privacy and security of electronic transactions is among the main reasons. This article attempts to form the appropriate confidence framework describing a set of privacy and security requirements that must be taken into account for e-ordering systems. In addition, it presents a trustful e-ordering architecture (TOES) that achieves to address these requirements based on extensible markup language (XML), XML cryptography, public key infrastructure (PKI), Web services policy language (WSPL), and Web services. TOES is an open, secure, interoperable, and affordable e-ordering system that respects the EU legislation.
Spam Classification Based on E-Mail Path Analysis
Authors: Palla Srikanth , Dantu Ram , Cangussu João W.
Published: February 2011

Email spam is the most effective form of online advertising. Unlike telephone marketing, email spamming does not require huge human or financial resources investment. Most existing spam filtering techniques concentrate on the emails’ content. However, most spammers obfuscate their emails’ content to circumvent content-based spam filters. An integrated solution for restricting spam emails is needed as content analyses alone might not provide a solution for filtering unsolicited emails. Here we present a new method for isolating unsolicited emails. Though spammers obfuscate their emails’ content, they do not have access to all the fields in the email header. Our classification method is based on the path an email traverses instead of content. Overall, our classifier produced fewer false positives when compared to current filters such as SpamAssassin. We achieved a precision of 98.65% which compares well with the precisions achieved by SPF, DNSRBL blacklists.
A Privacy Protection Model for Patient Data with Multiple Sensitive Attributes
Authors: Gal Tamas S. , Chen Zhiyuan , Gangopadhyay Aryya
Published: February 2011

The identity of patients must be protected when patient data are shared. The two most commonly used models to protect identity of patients are L-diversity and K-anonymity. However, existing work mainly considers data sets with a single sensitive attribute, while patient data often contain multiple sensitive attributes (e.g., diagnosis and treatment). This article shows that although the K-anonymity model can be trivially extended to multiple sensitive attributes, the L-diversity model cannot. The reason is that achieving L-diversity for each individual sensitive attribute does not guarantee L-diversity over all sensitive attributes. We propose a new model that extends L-diversity and K-anonymity to multiple sensitive attributes and propose a practical method to implement this model. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
A Decentralized Security Framework for Web-Based Social Networks
Authors: Carminati Barbara , Ferrari Elena , Perego Andrea
Published: February 2011

The wide diffusion and usage of social networking Web sites in the last years have made publicly available a huge amount of possible sensitive information, which can be used by third-parties with purposes different from the ones of the owners of such information. Currently, this issue has been addressed by enforcing into Web-based Social Networks (WBSNs) very simple protection mechanisms, or by using anonymization techniques, thanks to which it is possible to hide the identity of WBSN members while performing analysis on social network data. However, we believe that further solutions are needed, to allow WBSN members themselves to decide who can access their personal information and resources. To cope with this issue, in this article we illustrate a decentralized security framework for WBSNs, which provide both access control and privacy protection mechanisms. In our system, WBSN members can denote who is authorized to access the resources they publish and the relationships they participate in, in terms of the type, depth, and trust level of the relationships existing between members of a WBSN. Cryptographic techniques are then used to provide a controlled sharing of resources while preserving relationship privacy.
SecCMP
Authors: Yang Li , Peng Lu , Ramadass Balachandran
Published: February 2011

Security has been considered as an important issue in processor design. Most of the existing designs of security handling assume the chip as a single secure unit. However, such assumption is vulnerable to exposure resulted from a central failure point. In this article, we propose a secure Chip-Multiprocessor architecture (SecCMP) to handle security related problems such as key protection and core authentication in multi-core systems. Matching the nature of multi-core systems, a distributed threshold secret sharing scheme is employed to protect critical secrets. A critical secret (e.g., encryption key) is divided into multiple shares and distributed among multiple cores instead of being kept a single copy in one core that is sensitive to exposure. The proposed SecCMP can not only enhance the security and fault-tolerance in secret protection but also support core authentication. SecCMP is designed to be an efficient and secure architecture for CMPs.
Data Privacy and Security
Authors: Suleiman James , Huston Terry
Published: February 2011

Compliance with regulatory guidelines and mandates surrounding information security and the protection of privacy has been under close scrutiny for some time throughout the world. Smaller organizations have remained “out of the spotlight” and generally do not hire staff with the expertise to fully address issues of compliance. This case study examines a project partnership between an information-technology (IT) consultant who specializes in small business and a diminutive medical practice that sought support with compliance issues surrounding a research study it was conducting. Other small medical practices were contributing to the research; consequently, information sharing while concurrently adhering to the regulations of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996 was a significant aspect of the project. It was also critical that numerous other security and privacy legislative requirements were met. The issue of data security is often neglected in IT instruction. This case study provides a foundation for examining aspects of information security from the perspective of the small-business IT consultant.
Irrigation Water Valuation Using Spatial Hedonic Models in GIS Environment
Authors: Mallios Zisis
Published: February 2011

Hedonic pricing is an indirect valuation method that applies to heterogeneous goods investigating the relationship between the prices of tradable goods and their attributes. It can be used to measure the value of irrigation water through the estimation of the model that describes the relation between the market value of the land parcels and its characteristics. Because many of the land parcels included in a hedonic pricing model are spatial in nature, the conventional regression analysis fails to incorporate all the available information. Spatial regression models can achieve more efficient estimates because they are designed to deal with the spatial dependence of the data. In this paper, the authors present the results of an application of the hedonic pricing method on irrigation water valuation obtained using a software tool that is developed for the ArcGIS environment. This tool incorporates, in the GIS application, the estimation of two different spatial regression models, the spatial lag model and the spatial error model. It also has the option for different specifications of the spatial weights matrix, giving the researcher the opportunity to examine how it affects the overall performance of the model.
The Impact of Information Technologies on the US Beef Industry's Supply Chain
Authors: Neureuther Brian D. , Kenyon George N.
Published: February 2011

Historically, the growth of the beef industry has been hampered by the various entities (breeders, cow-calf producers, stockers, backgrounders) within the beef industry’s supply chain. The primary obstacles to growth are the large number of participants in the upstream partners and the lack of coordination between them. Over the last decade significant advances have been made in information technologies. Many new companies have been founded to promote these technical advances. This research looks at the upstream participants, primarily the buyer agencies and principles between the cow-calf producers and the meat packing companies, to determine the degree to which information technologies are currently being utilized and the degree to which these new technologies have driven improvements within the beef industry’s supply chain. We find through our survey that, by and large, the beef industry does not use information technologies to their benefit and that the U.S. beef supply chain is not yet strategically poised to enable the use of these technologies.