bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
From Tough Negotiation to Complex Integration
Authors: Nagle Tadhg , Finnegan Patrick , Hayes Jeremy
Published: April 2010

For many organisations e-Procurement has become a necessity. Nevertheless, while e-procurement has generated considerable hype the phenomenon is generally under-researched despite the fundamental impact that e-Procurement has on the nature of inter-organisational relationships This paper explores the effects that business-to-business relationships have on e-Procurement systems using a field study of 6 companies. The study classifies business-to-business (B2B) relationships as being adversarial and collaborative, where adversarial relationships include attributes such as tough negotiation, short-term contracts and multiple sourcing, while collaborative relationships include cooperation, mutual benefit and trust, strategies such as cross-functional team decision-making, supply base rationalisation, and long-term contracts. The effects of both relationships on the electronically supported transaction phases of the procurement lifecycle are examined. The research findings indicate that adversarial relationships have most effect on the sourcing phases whereas collaborative relationships most affect the, fulfilment, and consumption phases of the procurement cycle. This further highlights the need for practitioners to manage and understand the interorganisational relationships within their business.
Integrating Sensor Nodes into a Middleware for Ambient Intelligence
Authors: Klus Holger , Niebuhr Dirk
Published: April 2010

The development of infrastructures enabling dynamic and automated composition of IT systems is a big challenge. This paper addresses a new idea of allowing component-based systems to reconfigure themselves. Therefore, the authors propose DAiSI - a Dynamic Adaptive System Infrastructure for dynamic integration of components as well as their reconfiguration during runtime. Thereby, one of the features of the infrastructure is that it is capable of binding components based on their availability. In this paper the authors concentrate on presenting how resource constrained sensor nodes can be integrated into a system using this infrastructure.
Intrusive Evaluation of Ambient Displays
Authors: Shen Xiaobin
Published: April 2010

Ambient display is a display, which sits on the peripheral of user’s attention. Currently, the research on ambient displays is still in initial stage, so few evaluation styles are available to evaluate ambient displays. Our previous research (Shen, Eades, Hong, & Moere, 2007) proposed two evaluation styles for ambient displays: Intrusive Evaluation and Non-Intrusive Evaluation. In this journal, we focus on the first style by applying two intrusive evaluation case studies. The first case study compares the performance of three different peripheral display systems on both large and small displays. Our results indicate there is a significant difference on a primary task performance and a peripheral comprehension task between large and small displays. Furthermore, we have found that distraction may be composed by display-distraction and self-interruption, and that animation may only influence the display-distraction. In addition, a measurement of efficiency derived from cognitive science is proposed. The second case study focuses on exploring the correct disruptive order of visual cues (animation, color, area and position). Our results show that the correct disruptive order of visual cues in ambient displays is: animation, color, area and position. Furthermore, we also revealed how display-distraction influences the comprehension of ambient display. In addition, this case study further amended the measurement of efficiency, which was proposed in previous case study, to improve its accuracy.
RFID-Enabled Location Determination Within Indoor Environments
Authors: Curran Kevin , Norrby Stephen
Published: April 2010

The ability to track the real-time location and movement of items or people offers a broad range of useful applications in areas such as safety, security and the supply chain. Current location determination technologies, however, have limitations that heavily restrict how and where these applications are implemented, including the cost, accuracy of the location calculation and the inherent properties of the system. The Global Positioning System (GPS), for example, cannot function indoors and is useful only over large-scaled areas such as an entire city. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is an automatic identification technology which has seen increasingly prominent use over the last few decades. The technology uses modulated Radio Frequency signals to transfer data between its two main components, the reader and the transponder. Its many applications include supply chain management, asset tracking, security clearance and automatic toll collection. In recent years, advancements in the technology have allowed the location of transponders to be calculated while interfacing with the reader. This article documents an investigation into using an active RFID based solution for tracking.
Social Network Sites
Authors: Zammar Nisrine
Published: April 2010

This article examines the role of actors in a Social Network Sites and also the triggers and challenges they represent to social networking between today’s communities and businesses. A Social Network Sites is the product of the evolution of social liaisons and the emergence of online communities of people who are interested in exploring the concerns and activities of others. A social network is the assembly of direct or indirect contacts; a network is the product of interactions with the actors (individuals, families, enterprises, etc.) enabled by means of the structural design of web 2.0. Social Network Sites bring people together to interact through chat rooms, and share personal information and ideas around any topics via personal homepage publishing tools. This article is intended to be a trigger to deeply and more intensely explore potential roles of actor-network theory in the Social Network Sites context, in today’s and tomorrow’s world.
End User Context Modeling in Ambient Assisted Living
Authors: Wojciechowski Manfred
Published: April 2010

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) services provide intelligent and context aware assistance for elderly people in their home environment. Following the vision of an open AAL service marketplace, such an approach has to support all lifecycle phases of an AAL service, starting with its specification and development until its operation within the user’s smart environment. In AAL the support of a user level context model becomes important. This enables an inhabitant of a smart home to get and give feedback on context without technical expertise and intensive training. At the same time, the context model has to be operational and to support context dependent service adaption and abstraction of the underlying context sensors. This leads to a layered context model for AAL with abstraction levels for different aspects. In this paper we focus on the requirements, the model elements and the concepts of the user interface layer of our approach.
Statistical Properties of Community Dynamics in Large Social Networks
Authors: Palla Gergely , Vicsek Tamás
Published: April 2010

The authors’ focus is on the general statistical features of the time evolution of communities (also called as modules, clusters or cohesive groups) in large social networks. These structural sub-units can correspond to highly connected circles of friends, families, or professional cliques, which are subject to constant change due to the intense fluctuations in the activity and communication patterns of people. The communities can grow by recruiting new members, or contract by loosing members; two (or more) groups may merge into a single community, while a large enough social group can split into several smaller ones; new communities are born and old ones may disappear. According to our results, the time evolution of social groups containing only a few members and larger communities, e.g., institutions show significant differences.
CIUCEU
Authors: Rodrigues David
Published: April 2010

In this article, a study on informal communication network formation in a university environment is presented. The teacher communication network is analyzed through community detection techniques. It is evident that informal communication is an important process that traverses the vertical hierarchical structure of departments and courses in a university environment. A multi-agent model of the case study is presented here, showing the implications of using real data as training sets for multi-agent-based simulations. The influence of the “social neighborhood,” as a mechanism to create assortative networks of contacts without full knowledge of the network, is discussed. It is shown that the radius of this social neighborhood has an effect on the outcome of the network structure and that in a university’s case this distance is relatively small.
Adaptive Integrated Control for Omnidirectional Mobile Manipulators Based on Neural-Network
Authors: Tan Xiang-min , Zhao Dongbin , Yi Jianqiang , Xu Dong
Published: April 2010

An omnidirectional mobile manipulator, due to its large-scale mobility and dexterous manipulability, has attracted lots of attention in the last decades. However, modeling and control of such systems are very challenging because of their complicated mechanism. In this article, an unified dynamic model is developed by Lagrange Formalism. In terms of the proposed model, an adaptive integrated tracking controller, based on the computed torque control (CTC) method and the radial basis function neural-network (RBFNN), is presented subsequently. Although CTC is an effective motion control strategy for mobile manipulators, it requires precise models. To handle the unmodeled dynamics and the external disturbance, a RBFNN, serving as a compensator, is adopted. This proposed controller combines the advantages of CTC and RBFNN. Simulation results show the correctness of the proposed model and the effectiveness of the control approach.
Formalizing Interchange Competences
Authors: de la Encina Alberto , Hidalgo-Herrero Mercedes , López Natalia
Published: April 2010

An important aspect in multi-agent cognitive systems is being able to provide negotiation facilities to agents. In this article we deal with this problem by presenting a formal environment allowing to specify preferences. Moreover, our framework describes how to perform exchanges among the entities involved in the system. The exchanges are not restricted to material goods, as we introduce capabilities to deal with intangible goods. The description of the system is formalized by using a simple process algebra that allows dealing with entities organized in a hierarchical way.
An Unbiased Linear Adaptive Filter with Normalized Coefficients for the Removal of Noise in Electrocardiographic Signals
Authors: Wu Yunfeng , Rangayyan Rangaraj M.
Published: April 2010

The authors propose an unbiased linear adaptive filter (ULAF) to eliminate high-frequency random noise in electrocardiographic (ECG) signals. The ULAF does not contain a bias in its summation unit, and the filter coefficients are normalized. During the adaptation process, the normalized coefficients are updated with the steepest-descent algorithm in order to achieve efficient filtering of noisy ECG signals. The authors tested the ULAF with ECG signals recorded from 16 subjects, and compared the performance of the ULAF with that of the least-mean-square (LMS) and recursive-least-squares (RLS) adaptive filters. The filtering performance was quantified in terms of the root-mean-squared error (RMSE), normalized correlation coefficient (NCC), and filtered noise entropy (FNE). A template derived from each ECG signal was used as the reference to compute the measures of filtering performance. The results indicated that the ULAF was able to provided noise-free ECG signals with an average RMSE of 0.0287, which was lower than the second best RMSE (0.0365) obtained with the LMS filter. With respect to waveform fidelity, the proposed ULAF provided the highest average NCC (0.9964) among the three filters studied. In addition, the ULAF effectively removed more noise measured by FNE versus the LMS and RLS filters in most of the ECG signals tested.
Service Integration through Structure-Preserving Semantic Matching
Authors: McNeill Fiona , Besana Paolo , Pane Juan , Giunchiglia Fausto
Published: April 2010

The problem of integrating services is becoming increasingly pressing. In large, open environments such as the Semantic Web, huge numbers of services are developed by vast numbers of different users. Imposing strict semantics standards in such an environment is useless; fully predicting in advance which services one will interact with is not always possible as services may be temporarily or permanently unreachable, may be updated or may be superseded by better services. In some situations, characterised by unpredictability, such as the emergency response scenario described in this case, the best solution is to enable decisions about which services to interact with to be made on-the-fly. We propose a method of doing this using matching technique to map the anticipated call to the input that the service is actually expecting. To be practical, this must be done during run-time. In this case, we present our structure-preserving semantic matching algorithm (SPSM), which performs this matching task both for perfect and approximate matches between calls. In addition, we introduce the OpenKnowledge system for service interaction which, using the SPSM algorithm, along with many other features, facilitates on-the-fly interaction between services in an arbitrarily large network without any global agreements or pre-run-time knowledge of who to interact with or how interactions will proceed. We provide a preliminary evaluation of the SPSM algorithm within the OpenKnowledge framework.
Assessing the Performance of Airline Web Sites
Authors: Harison Elad , Boonstra Albert
Published: April 2010

This case takes place in the increasingly competitive environment of the airline sector.Airline websites and Internet-based booking systems enable transformation of airline operations and become strategic weapons for the majority of airlines worldwide. Established airlines are attempting to stimulate customers to use the Internet, in response to entry of low cost carriers that capture shares of their market and in order to reduce their sales costs. Nonetheless, the development and maintenance of websites and e-commerce platforms requires substantial investments in capital and labor. Therefore, airlines need to assess the performance of their e-commerce channels in terms of profitability, customer appreciation and volume of sales on a continuous basis. However, the design of an assessment model that can serve the managers of ARTFLY, one of the established airlines in the industry that deals with the recent challenges of the intensifying competition, is open for a wide variety of interpretations and should be determined due to the firm’s nature of operations and due to its aim to increase the volume of its online sales.
CRM in the Context of Airline Industry
Authors: Eid Riyad , Zaidi Mustafa
Published: April 2010

The airline industry is known as high-tech industry that leads other business sectors, serving as a technological role-model. This paper proposes a conceptual model for Customer Relationship Management (CRM) implementation in the airline industry, using a case study of a Mexican airline. The authors provide new theoretical grounds for studying the CRM. This study is an empirical assessment of the CRM model and also assesses the basic phases of the CRM implementation which are 1) Information Phase, 2) Trust Phase and 3) Objectives Phase.
Role of Time in Development of Trust Within Hi-Tech SME Business Relationships
Authors: Sharif Khurram , Salaheldin Salaheldin Ismail
Published: April 2010

This study investigated the function of time (as a moderator, determinant or quasi moderator) within hi tech Small to Medium Sized Enterprise (SME) downstream (i.e., customer) trust-based relationships. A four antecedent (i.e., competence, transaction specific investments, flexibility and coercive power) research model was developed to represent trust within the SME business-to-business (b-to-b) relationships. Time was conceptualized chronologically as duration of a relationship in years. The model was empirically tested with 117 respondents from the UK Original Equipment Manufacturing (OEM) sector. The research outcome supported a significant and positive moderating effect of time on competence to trust and flexibility to trust pathways. However, time had a negative moderating yet significant effect on the association between coercive power and trust. Correlation between Transaction Specific Investments (TSIs) and trust was significant but time showed neither moderating nor deterministic effect on the TSIs to trust link.
Understanding the Process of Online Grooming
Authors: Gottschalk Petter , Kristoffersen Ragnar
Published: April 2010

The purpose of this article is to present some topics relevant to our understanding of the online grooming process that pedophile men apply to target young people online for future sexual abuse. The legislative context of Norway is explored in this article, and Norwegian Supreme Court decisions are described. Some approaches to educational awareness and Internet safety are presented, as well as educational awareness campaigns. Furthermore, characteristics of the Internet for online grooming are discussed.
Using S-P Chart and Bloom Taxonomy to Develop Intelligent Formative Assessment Tool
Authors: Chang Wen-Chih , Yang Hsuan-Che , Shih Timothy K. , Chao Louis R.
Published: April 2010

E-learning provides a convenient and efficient way for learning. Formative assessment not only guides student in instruction and learning, diagnose skill or knowledge gaps, but also measures progress and evaluation. An efficient and convenient e-learning formative assessment system is the key character for e-learning. However, most e-learning systems didn’t provide methods for assessing learners’ abilities but true-score mode. In this article, Sato’s Student-Problem Chart (SP Chart) is applied to integrate with our proposed on-line assessment system. Teachers are able to analyze each learner easily and efficiently. In addition, the Bloom Taxonomy of Educational Objective supports each item in our assessment management system during the authoring time. In our proposed system, it provides groups of function for student, teacher, and system administrator. According to the SP Chart analysis and Bloom taxonomy of items, we can divide all items into four types, and students into six types. With these types of diagnosis analysis chart, teacher can modify or delete the items which are not proper. With diagnosis analysis chart of students, teachers can realize learners’ learning situation easily and efficiently.
Designing Document SQL (DSQL)
Authors: Sengupta Arijit , Ramesh V.
Published: April 2010

This article presents DSQL, a conservative extension of SQL, as an ad-hoc query language for XML. The development of DSQL follows the theoretical foundations of first order logic, and uses common query semantics already accepted for SQL. DSQL represents a core subset of XQuery that lends well to optimization techniques, while at the same time allows easy integration into current databases and applications that useSQL. The intent of DSQL is not to replace XQuery, the current W3C recommended XML query language, but to serve as an ad-hoc querying frontend to XQuery. Further, the authors present proofs for important query language properties such as complexity and closure. An empirical study comparing DSQL and XQuery for the purpose of ad-hoc querying demonstrates that users perform better with DSQL for both flat and tree structures, in terms of both accuracy and efficiency.
Collaborative Enterprise Architecture Design and Development with a Semantic Collaboration Tool
Authors: Fuchs-Kittowski Frank , Faust Daniel
Published: April 2010

The design and evolution of an enterprise architecture (EA) is a challenging and complex task. A participative approach to collaborative EA management is needed to support the collaboration of all individuals involved in the process of EA design and evolution. This article presents our concept of a semantic collaboration tool for collaborative EA management. This includes the concept of a semantic, Wiki-like collaboration tool for collaborative EA management and an EA ontology as a formal representation of the EA. Additionally, the prototypical implementation of the semantic collaboration environment and its architecture are described and the benefits of the approach discussed.
Leaders as Mediators of Global Megatrends
Authors: Giritli-Nygren Katarina , Lindblad-Gidlund Katarina
Published: April 2010

The idea of eGovernment is moving rapidly within supra-national and national and local institutions. At every level leaders are interpreting the idea, attempting to grasp either the next step or indeed the very essence of the idea itself. This article outlines a diagnostic framework, resting on three different dimensions; translation, interpretative frames and sensemaking, to create knowledge about the translation processes and by doing so, emphasize enactment rather than vision. The diagnostic framework is then empirically examined to explore its possible contribution to the understanding of the complexity of leader’s translating and mediating the idea of eGovernment in their local context. In conclusion it is noted that the diagnostic framework reveals logic of appropriateness between local mediators, eGovernment, different areas of interest and appropriate organizational practices.
Aviation-Related Expertise and Usability
Authors: Ferne Friedman-Berg Ferne , Allendoerfer Kenneth , Pai Shantanu
Published: April 2010

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Human Factors Team - Atlantic City conducted a usability assessment of the www.fly.faa.gov Web site to examine user satisfaction and identify site usability issues. The FAA Air Traffic Control System Command Center uses this Web site to provide information about airport conditions, such as arrival and departure delays, to the public and the aviation industry. The most important aspect of this assessment was its use of quantitative metrics to evaluate how successfully users with different levels of aviation-related expertise could complete common tasks, such as determining the amount of delay at an airport. The researchers used the findings from this assessment to make design recommendations for future system enhancements that would benefit all users. They discuss why usability assessments are an important part of the process of evaluating e-government Web sites and why their usability evaluation process should be applied to the development of other e-government Web sites.
Motivations and Trends for IT/IS Adoption
Authors: Varajão João , Trigo Antonio , Barroso João
Published: April 2010

Over the past few decades, information systems and technologies have taken on a wide variety of roles within organizations, ranging from operational support to the strategic support of the company. Therefore, there have been significant changes in the motives for their adoption that are vital to understand to guarantee that investment is properly managed. With the purpose of identifying and characterizing the motivations currently behind the adoption of information technologies in large Portuguese companies, which systems the companies have been implementing, in which systems they intend to invest in short-term, and what is the current role of information technology within the organization, we carried out a study with the participation of several chief information officers. The findings of this study reveal that the reasons for adoption and the role that information systems and technologies play is evolving in Portuguese companies and that the adoption of certain types of systems like Enterprise Resource Planning systems is now consolidated, whereas the adoption of other systems like Business Intelligence systems should increase significantly in the near future.
Consumer Value of Context Aware and Location Based Mobile Services
Authors: de Vos Henny , Haaker Timber , Teerling Marije , Kleijnen Mirella
Published: April 2010

Context aware services have the ability to utilize information about the user’s context and adapt services to a user’s current situation and needs. In this article the authors consider users’ perceptions of the added value of location awareness and presence information in mobile services. The authors use an experimental design, where stimuli comprising specific bundles of mobile services were presented to groups of respondents. The stimuli showed increasing, manipulated, levels of context-awareness, including location of the user and location and availability of buddies as distinct levels. Their results indicate that simply adding context aware features to mobile services does not necessarily provide added value to users, rather the contrary. The potential added value of insight in buddies’ location and availability is offset by people’s reluctance to share location information with others. Although the average perceived value overall is rather low there exists a substantial minority that does appreciate the added context aware features. High scores on constructs like product involvement, social influence and self-expressiveness characterize this group. The results also show that context aware service bundles with utilitarian elements have a higher perceived value than bundles with hedonic elements. On the basis of the different results some guidelines for designing context aware mobile services are formulated.
Investigating Perceptions of Avatar Creation for Use in Educational MUVEs
Authors: DiPietro Joseph
Published: April 2010

The purpose of this qualitative inquiry is to extend the investigation of perceptions and experiences of users creating avatars for interactions in online learning environments. Using Linden Lab’s Second Life, volunteers created three-dimensional representations of themselves, called avatars, under the premise of participating in a hypothetical online class. Avatar creation sessions were book-ended with pre- and post- interviews focused on participant perceptions of various elements of self-representation and interactions as situated in online environments. Human computer interactions (HCI) of avatar creation were also explored. Findings indicate users created avatars that mirrored their respective physical appearances as closely as possible and were collectively adamant in feeling morally obliged to do so.
A Push-Based Prefetching for Remote Caching RAM Grid
Authors: Chu Rui , Xiao Nong , Lu Xicheng
Published: April 2010

As an innovative grid computing technique for sharing the distributed memory resources in a high-speed widearea network, RAM Grid exploits the distributed computing nodes, and provides remote memory for the user nodes which are short of memory. The performance of RAM Grid is constrained with the expensive network communication cost. In order to hide the latency of remote memory access and improve the performance, the authors proposed the push-based prefetching to enable the memory providers to push the potential useful pages to the user nodes. For each provider, it employs sequential pattern mining techniques, which adapts to the characteristics of memory page access sequences, on locating useful memory pages for prefetching. They have verified the effectiveness of the proposed method through trace-driven simulations.
Extended Prefix Hash Trees for a Distributed Phone Book Application
Authors: Stäber Fabian , Kunzmann Gerald , Müller Jörg P.
Published: April 2010

Besides file sharing, IP telephony has become the most widely used peer-to-peer-based application. Software and hardware phones with built-in peer-to-peer stacks are used to enable IP telephony in closed networks on large company sites as well as in the Internet. As part of the PeerThings project1, Siemens developed a decentralized communication platform supporting video communication, voice communication, instant messaging, and so on. While decentralized communication has already been implemented in related work, providing a scalable peer-to-peer-based distributed directory for searching user entries is still an unsolved challenge. In this article we present the Extended Prefix Hash Tree algorithm that can be used to implement an indexing infrastructure supporting range queries on top of DHTs.
Space-Time Cluster Analysis
Authors: Woodside Joseph M. , Sikder Iftikhar U.
Published: April 2010

Spatial epidemiological approach to healthcare studies provides significant insight in evaluating health intervention and decision making. This article illustrates a space-time cluster analysis using Kulldorff’s Scan Statistics (1999), local indicators of spatial autocorrelation, and local G-statistics involving routine clinical service data as part of a limited data set collected by a Northeast Ohio healthcare organization (Kaiser Foundation Health Plan of Ohio) over a period 1994—2006. The objective is to find excess space and space - time variations of lung cancer and to identify potential monitoring and healthcare management capabilities. The results were compared with earlier research (Tyczynski, & Berkel, 2005); similarities were noted in patient demographics for the targeted study area. The findings also provide evidence that diagnosis data collected as a result of rendered health services can be used in detecting potential disease patterns and/or utilization patterns, with the overall objective of improving health outcomes.
Children's Maps in GIS
Authors: Nordin Kerstin , Berglund Ulla
Published: April 2010

Since 2002 the authors have successively developed “Children’s Maps in GIS”, a method for children’s participation in spatial planning. Their studies show that 10-15 year-olds are capable of reading maps and using a GIS-application for communicating their interests in a stable and useful manner. The purpose of this article is to discuss the first stages of implementation in a real world project, in relation to ICT. The authors report experiences from a Swedish municipality using Children’s Maps in GIS in a survey with over 600 children as part of a comprehensive planning process and give examples of how data can be visualized. A significant digital divide between different parts of the administration is noted. In the ongoing development into an Internet version of the method the authors aim to increase the access to the GIS-application and develop standard procedures for categorizing and analyzing data.
A Proposed Framework for Developing a National Crisis Management Information System
Authors: Kabeil Magdy M.
Published: April 2010

A conceptual design representing basic modules of National Crisis Management Information System NCMIS is developed. The conceptual design provides a general foundation that can be transferred to a detailed design and implementation of an application. The concept of NCMIS meets the initial specifications that are validated using a case scenario. The relative percentage of the total score that each module contributes to the design is evaluated using the Analytical Hierarchy Process AHP and the Quality Function Deployment QFD technique.
Production Lots as Determinant of Paper Production Lead Time Performance
Authors: Koskinen Pekka , Hilmola Olli-Pekka
Published: April 2010

In this research work we are interested about connection between lead time performance, and production order size as well as in how many production lots this order was eventually produced. Based on the system dynamics simulation model, the authors got a priori assumption that production lots have in multiproduct environment better explanation power. Our empirical findings give support for this – number of production lots explain in production environment manufacturing lead time much better than production order size. Further support is gained from supply chain phases, which are analyzed similarly, but as surprise explanation power of production lots decreases, and seems to be significantly lower in more distant markets. It is interesting to note that currently used IT applications of analyzed global case company do not give real time snapshot regarding to the development of overall supply chain lead time.
Semantic Metadata Interoperability and Inference-Based Querying in Digital Repositories
Authors: Koutsomitropoulos Dimitrios A. , Solomou Georgia D. , Alexopoulos Andreas D. , Papatheodorou Theodore S.
Published: April 2010

Metadata applications have evolved in time into highly structured “islands of information” about digital resources, often bearing a strong semantic interpretation. Scarcely, however, are these semantics being communicated in machine readable and understandable ways. At the same time, the process for transforming the implied metadata knowledge into explicit Semantic Web descriptions can be problematic and is not always evident. In this article we take upon the well-established Dublin Core metadata standard as well as other metadata schemata, which often appear in digital repositories set-ups, and suggest a proper Semantic Web OWL ontology. In this process the authors cope with discrepancies and incompatibilities, indicative of such attempts, in novel ways. Moreover, we show the potential and necessity of this approach by demonstrating inferences on the resulting ontology, instantiated with actual metadata records. The authors conclude by presenting a working prototype that provides for inference-based querying on top of digital repositories.
Generating Join Queries for Large Databases and Web Services
Authors: Bagui Sikha , Loggins Adam
Published: April 2010

In this data-centric world, as Web services and service oriented architectures gain momentum and become a standard for data usage, there will be a need for tools to automate data retrieval. In this article the authors propose a tool that automates the generation of joins in a transparent and integrated fashion in heterogeneous large databases as well as Web services. This tool reads metadata information and automatically displays a join path and a SQL join query. This tool will be extremely useful for performing joins to help in the retrieval of information in large databases as well as Web services.
Information Influence in Mediated Knowledge Transfer
Authors: Fadel Kelly J. , Durcikova Alexandra , Cha Hoon S.
Published: April 2010

Understanding knowledge transfer in computer mediated contexts is becoming essential given that organizations are spread more and more globally. In this article, the authors adopt elaboration likelihood theory to investigate knowledge transfer processes in a Knowledge Management System (KMS). They report the results of an exploratory experiment conducted to examine the impact of argument quality, source credibility and validation on knowledge usefulness of a document in a KMS. Their findings indicate that while validation of knowledge in KMS positively affects perceptions of knowledge usefulness, higher argument quality was associated with lower usefulness ratings. Surprisingly, source credibility has no effect on perceptions of knowledge usefulness. The implications of these results for both researchers and practitioners are discussed.
An Adaptive and Context-Aware Scenario Model Based on a Web Service Architecture for Pervasive Learning Systems
Authors: Pham-Nguyen Cuong , Garlatti Serge , Lau B.-Y.-Simon , Barbry Benjamin , Vantroys Thomas
Published: April 2010

Pervasive learning will become increasingly important in technology-enhanced learning (TEL). In this context, development efforts focus on features such as context-awareness, adaptation, services retrieval and orchestration mechanisms. This paper proposes a process to assist the development of such systems, from conception through to execution. This paper focuses mainly on pervasive TEL systems in a learning situation at the workplace. We introduce a context-aware scenario model of corporate learning and working scenarios in e-retail environments such as shops and hypermarkets. This model enables us to integrate contextual information into scenarios and to select how to perform activities according to the current situation. Our pervasive learning system is based on a service oriented architecture that consists of an infrastructure for service management and execution that is flexible enough to reuse learning components and to deal with context changes that are not known in advance and discovered on the fly.
Throughput Optimization of Cooperative Teleoperated UGV Network
Authors: Abualhaol Ibrahim Y. , Matalgah Mustafa M.
Published: April 2010

Cooperative communications among group of teleoperated unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) allows to exploit spatial diversity in wireless fading channels by relaying signals between each other. Due to the high speed of the UGVs, the nature of the channel environments and the possible co-channel interference, the effect of multipath propagation and the Doppler spread are more pronounced. In this article, we proposed a low complexity dynamic channel assignment (DCA) technique with adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) strategy to allocate the available bandwidth over a number of communications links in a cooperative UGV network. In many processing algorithms and transmission protocols reported in the literature, performance improvement in terms of system throughput and reliability has been demonstrated. The proposed DCA with AMC in a cooperative UGV network has two objectives. First, to maximize the overall throughput of the cooperative UGV network and second, to significantly reduce the probability of outage in the system. In this article, the outage is defined as the percentage of time the links are incapable of supporting a minimum required transmission rate which is determined by the application. The DCA approach is formulated in terms of a binary optimization problem that is solved using the branch-and-bound method. The authors assum the links in the network to be Rayleigh faded and we used a finite state Markov chain (FSMC) for their modeling. Using Monte Carlo simulation, we showed that the proposed DCA approach in a cooperative UGVs provides significant gain in the overall throughput and reduction in the outage probability compared to the static channel assignment (SCA).
Pervasive or Invasive? A Strategic Approach to IT-Enabled Access and Immediacy
Authors: Brennan Linda L.
Published: April 2010

While many organizations and individuals use information technologies (IT) to overcome the limitations of time and space, they often experience unintended consequences from increased immediacy and access. How can they achieve the desirable changes and address the negative effects that can result? This article presents a systematic framework that managers can use to proactively identify ways to either leverage or mitigate the increased immediacy and access. Specific examples are used as illustrations to demonstrate how these issues can be anticipated and used for competitive advantage. They are not offered as specific “prescriptions” for any one organization. Rather, they show how the framework can info*m managers as they evaluate proposals for and implementation plans of new information systems in their organizations.
Shifting Ground for Health Information Systems
Authors: Miscione Gianluca , Staring Knut
Published: April 2010

This article addresses the institutional scaling of information systems through the interplay of globally distributed free and open source software development with organizational processes. Through examining various phases of a long term project to implement information systems for the public health care sector in resource-poor countries, we highlight changing sources of acceptance and legitimation. The analysis centers on the balance between local and global levels, from pilot sites, through an emerging broader organizational field, to increasingly involving national level institutional settings. In parallel to the established view of the scaling of ICT implementations as relating to complexity and risk in the form of unintended side-effects of the growth of a system, the authors highlight the qualitative switch between regulatory contexts. Shifting relations to local institutions means that scalability requires actors to interact with quite different organizational cultures, accountabilities and communicative practices.
Research on a Case of Technology Transfer Between France and China
Authors: Ruffier Clément
Published: April 2010

Traditional technology transfer projects are based on the assumption that they can provide direct economic and social development for the receiving countries. In social sciences, this approach is called “technology determinism”: it states that technologies have a decisive effect on societies and that their innovation and use are independent from any social influences. This belief underestimates the weight of society with regards to technologies, its social shaping (Bijker and Law, 1992), and has been the cause of the failure of many technology transfer projects. To what extent, transferred technologies have to be modified to be adopted in a specific developing country? What are their effects on local cultures? The aim of this article is to build an analytical model to understand the role of technological objects in the process of transfers related to development issues, with a special focus on information and communication technologies (ICT). To answer these questions, we studied a case of technology transfer: the sale of a truck engine patent between a French manufacturer (Renault Trucks) and its Chinese partner Dongfeng Limited.
The Change Equation
Authors: Duschinsky Peter
Published: April 2010

In this article, the author investigates the nature of complexity and its role in project failure. Also, the paper proposes a model to assess complexity. It draws some conclusions about the implications for change management interventions. The author finds that projects fail when the complexity exceeds the capability of the organisation to cope. The overall aim of the article is to offer an approach to reducing this number of failed change projects.
A Lexical Knowledge Representation Model for Natural Language Understanding
Authors: Chen Ping , Ding Wei , Ding Chengmin
Published: April 2010

Knowledge representation is essential for semantics modeling and intelligent information processing. For decades researchers have proposed many knowledge representation techniques. However, it is a daunting problem how to capture deep semantic information effectively and support the construction of a large-scale knowledge base efficiently. This article describes a new knowledge representation model, SenseNet, which provides semantic support for commonsense reasoning and natural language processing. SenseNet is formalized with a Hidden Markov Model. An inference algorithm is proposed to simulate human-like natural language understanding procedure. A new measurement, confidence, is introduced to facilitate the natural language understanding. The authors present a detailed case study of applying SenseNet to retrieving compensation information from company proxy filings.
Technological Trends in Adult Education
Authors: Hope John K.
Published: April 2010

The purpose of this article is to provide a critical review of the past two decades of technology use in adult education. The article begins with a brief summary of technological trends, such as the introduction of the Internet and the World Wide Web, that have influenced adult education over the past two decades. Political, economic, social, and pedagogical issues that have influenced the use of technology in adult education are also discussed and possible solutions to these issues are outlined. The article concludes with an attempt to extrapolate future technological trends that could influence the direction of adult education in the decade to come.
Security for Web Services
Authors: Martino Lorenzo D. , Bertino Elisa
Published: April 2010

This article discusses the main security requirements for Web services and it describes how such security requirements are addressed by standards for Web services security recently developed or under development by various standardizations bodies. Standards are reviewed according to a conceptual framework that groups them by the main functionalities they provide. Covered standards include most of the standards encompassed by the original Web Service Security roadmap proposed by Microsoft and IBM in 2002 (Microsoft and IBM 2002). They range from the ones geared toward message and conversation security and reliability to those developed for providing interoperable Single Sign On and Identity Management functions in federated organizations. The latter include Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), WS-Policy, XACML, that is related to access control and has been recently extended with a profile for Web services access control; XKMS and WS-Trust; WS-Federation, Liberty Alliance and Shibboleth, that address the important problem of identity management in federated organizations. The article also discusses the issues related to the use of the standards and open research issues in the area of access control for Web services and innovative digital identity management techniques are outlined.
Tonic-Clonic Seizures in a Postpartum Patient: Case Report
Authors: Small Kathryn R. , Cannava Maureen , Casey Stefanie , Jacques Judy
Published: May 2010

Eclamptic seizures are a known complication of pregnancy; less well publicized is the patient with late postpartum eclampsia. Late postpartum eclamptic seizures are convulsions that occur more then 48 hours after delivery. Because 40% of patients who have late postpartum eclampsia do not experience preeclampsia, clinical awareness is essential for early treatment and care.
Cutting Edge: Mechanical Forces Acting on T Cells Immobilized via the TCR Complex Can Trigger TCR Signaling
Authors: Li Ya-Chen , Chen Bing-Mae , Wu Pei-Chun , Cheng Tian-Lu , Kao Lung-Sen , Tao Mi-Hua , Lieber Andre , Roffler Steve R.
Published: May 2010

Engagement of the TCR by antigenic peptides presented by the MHC activates specific T cells to control infections. Recent theoretical considerations have suggested that mechanical forces acting on the TCR may be important for receptor triggering. In this study, we directly tested the hypothesis that physical forces acting on the TCR can initiate signaling in T cells by micromanipulation of individual T cells bound to artificial APCs expressing engineered TCR ligands. We find that mechanical forces acting on T cells bound to APCs via the TCR complex but not other surface receptors can initiate signaling in T cells in an Src kinase-dependent fashion. Our data indicate that T cells are mechanically sensitive when coupled to APCs by the TCR and indicates that the TCR may act as a mechanosensor. Our data provide new insight into TCR function.
Surfactant Protein D-Mediated Decrease of Allergen-Induced Inflammation Is Dependent upon CTLA4
Authors: Lin Ko-Wei , Jen Kai Yu , Suarez Carlos Jose , Crouch Erika C. , Perkins David L. , Finn Patricia W.
Published: May 2010

Pulmonary surfactant protein D (SP-D), a member of the collectin family, is an innate immune molecule critical for defense that can also modulate adaptive immune responses. We previously showed that SP-D–deficient mice exhibit enhanced allergic responses and that SP-D induction requires lymphocytes. Thus, we postulated that SP-D may decrease adaptive allergic responses through interaction with T cells. In this study, we used two forms of SP-D, a dodecamer and a shorter fragment containing the trimeric neck and carbohydrate recognition domains (SP-D NCRD). Both forms decreased immune responses in vitro and in a murine model of pulmonary inflammation. SP-D NCRD increased transcription of CTLA4, a negative regulator of T cell activation, in T cells. SP-D NCRD no longer decreased lymphoproliferation and IL-2 cytokine production when CTLA4 signals were abrogated. Administration of SP-D NCRD in vivo no longer decreased allergen induced responses when CTLA4 was inhibited. Our results indicate that SP-D decreases allergen responses, an effect that may be mediated by increase of CTLA4 in T cells.