bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Bibliomining for Library Decision-Making
Authors: Nicholson Scott
Published: May 2011

Most people think of a library as the little brick building in the heart of their community or the big brick building in the center of a college campus. However, these notions greatly oversimplify the world of libraries. Most large commercial organizations have dedicated in-house library operations, as do schools; nongovernmental organizations; and local, state, and federal governments. With the increasing use of the World Wide Web, digital libraries have burgeoned, serving a huge variety of different user audiences. With this expanded view of libraries, two key insights arise. First, libraries are typically embedded within larger institutions. Corporate libraries serve their corporations, academic libraries serve their universities, and public libraries serve taxpaying communities who elect overseeing representatives. Second, libraries play a pivotal role within their institutions as repositories and providers of information resources. In the provider role, libraries represent in microcosm the intellectual and learning activities of the people who comprise the institution. This fact provides the basis for the strategic importance of library data mining: By ascertaining what users are seeking, bibliomining can reveal insights that have meaning in the context of the library’s host institution. Use of data mining to examine library data might be aptly termed bibliomining. With widespread adoption of computerized catalogs and search facilities over the past quarter century, library and information scientists have often used bibliometric methods (e.g., the discovery of patterns in authorship and citation within a field) to explore patterns in bibliographic information. During the same period, various researchers have developed and tested data-mining techniques, which are advanced statistical and visualization methods to locate nontrivial patterns in large datasets. Bibliomining refers to the use of these bibliometric and data-mining techniques to explore the enormous quantities of data generated by the typical automated library.
Conceptual Modeling for Data Warehouse and OLAP Applications
Authors: Malinowski Elzbieta , Zimányi Esteban
Published: May 2011

The advantages of using conceptual models for database design are well known. In particular, they facilitate the communication between users and designers since they do not require the knowledge of specific features of the underlying implementation platform. Further, schemas developed using conceptual models can be mapped to different logical models, such as the relational, objectrelational, or object-oriented models, thus simplifying technological changes. Finally, the logical model is translated into a physical one according to the underlying implementation platform. Nevertheless, the domain of conceptual modeling for data warehouse applications is still at a research stage. The current state of affairs is that logical models are used for designing data warehouses, i.e., using star and snowflake schemas in the relational model. These schemas provide a multidimensional view of data where measures (e.g., quantity of products sold) are analyzed from different perspectives or dimensions (e.g., by product) and at different levels of detail with the help of hierarchies. On-line analytical processing (OLAP) systems allow users to perform automatic aggregations of measures while traversing hierarchies: the roll-up operation transforms detailed measures into aggregated values (e.g., daily into monthly sales) while the drill-down operation does the contrary. Star and snowflake schemas have several disadvantages, such as the inclusion of implementation details and the inadequacy of representing different kinds of hierarchies existing in real-world applications. In order to facilitate users to express their analysis needs, it is necessary to represent data requirements for data warehouses at the conceptual level. A conceptual multidimensional model should provide a graphical support (Rizzi, 2007) and allow representing facts, measures, dimensions, and different kinds of hierarchies.
Data Mining with Incomplete Data
Authors: Wang Hai , Wang Shouhong
Published: May 2011

Survey is one of the common data acquisition methods for data mining (Brin, Rastogi & Shim, 2003). In data mining one can rarely find a survey data set that contains complete entries of each observation for all of the variables. Commonly, surveys and questionnaires are often only partially completed by respondents. The possible reasons for incomplete data could be numerous, including negligence, deliberate avoidance for privacy, ambiguity of the survey question, and aversion. The extent of damage of missing data is unknown when it is virtually impossible to return the survey or questionnaires to the data source for completion, but is one of the most important parts of knowledge for data mining to discover. In fact, missing data is an important debatable issue in the knowledge engineering field (Tseng, Wang, & Lee, 2003). In mining a survey database with incomplete data, patterns of the missing data as well as the potential impacts of these missing data on the mining results constitute valuable knowledge. For instance, a data miner often wishes to know how reliable a data mining result is, if only the complete data entries are used; when and why certain types of values are often missing; what variables are correlated in terms of having missing values at the same time; what reason for incomplete data is likely, etc. These valuable pieces of knowledge can be discovered only after the missing part of the data set is fully explored.
Discovering Unknown Patterns in Free Text
Authors: Kroeze Jan H
Published: May 2011

A very large percentage of business and academic data is stored in textual format. With the exception of metadata, such as author, date, title and publisher, this data is not overtly structured like the standard, mainly numerical, data in relational databases. Parallel to data mining, which finds new patterns and trends in numerical data, text mining is the process aimed at discovering unknown patterns in free text. Owing to the importance of competitive and scientific knowledge that can be exploited from these texts, “text mining has become an increasingly popular and essential theme in data mining” (Han & Kamber, 2001, p. 428). Text mining is an evolving field and its relatively short history goes hand in hand with the recent explosion in availability of electronic textual information. Chen (2001, p. vi) remarks that “text mining is an emerging technical area that is relatively unknown to IT professions”. This explains the fact that despite the value of text mining, most research and development efforts still focus on data mining using structured data (Fan et al., 2006). In the next section, the background and need for text mining will be discussed after which the various uses and techniques of text mining are described. The importance of visualisation and some critical issues will then be discussed followed by some suggestions for future research topics.
Non-Linear Dimensionality Reduction Techniques
Authors: Pratihar Dilip Kumar
Published: May 2011

Most of the complex real-world systems involve more than three dimensions and it may be difficult to model these higher dimensional data related to their inputoutput relationships, mathematically. Moreover, the mathematical modeling may become computationally expensive for the said systems. A human being can visualize only up to three dimensions (3-D). So, any system involving more than 3-D cannot be visualized. To overcome this difficulty, higher dimensional data are generally mapped into either 2-D or 3-D, for visualization and ease of modeling. Dimensionality reduction techniques are nothing but the mapping methods, with the help of which the higher dimensional data can be mapped into the lower dimension after ensuring a reasonable accuracy. It is to be noted that the precision of modeling depends on the said accuracy in mapping. Thus, it is worthy to study the dimensionality reduction techniques.
Privacy-Preserving Data Mining
Authors: Oliveira Stanley R.M.
Published: May 2011

Despite its benefits in various areas (e.g., business, medical analysis, scientific data analysis, etc), the use of data mining techniques can also result in new threats to privacy and information security. The problem is not data mining itself, but the way data mining is done. “Data mining results rarely violate privacy, as they generally reveal high-level knowledge rather than disclosing instances of data” (Vaidya & Clifton, 2003). However, the concern among privacy advocates is well founded, as bringing data together to support data mining projects makes misuse easier. Thus, in the absence of adequate safeguards, the use of data mining can jeopardize the privacy and autonomy of individuals. Privacy-preserving data mining (PPDM) cannot simply be addressed by restricting data collection or even by restricting the secondary use of information technology (Brankovic & V. Estivill-Castro, 1999). Moreover, there is no exact solution that resolves privacy preservation in data mining. In some applications, solutions for PPDM problems might meet privacy requirements and provide valid data mining results (Oliveira & Zaïane, 2004b). We have witnessed three major landmarks that characterize the progress and success of this new research area: the conceptive landmark, the deployment landmark, and the prospective landmark. The Conceptive landmark characterizes the period in which central figures in the community, such as O’Leary (1995), Piatetsky-Shapiro (1995), and others (Klösgen, 1995; Clifton & Marks, 1996), investigated the success of knowledge discovery and some of the important areas where it can conflict with privacy concerns. The key finding was that knowledge discovery can open new threats to informational privacy and information security if not done or used properly. The Deployment landmark is the current period in which an increasing number of PPDM techniques have been developed and have been published in refereed conferences. The information available today is spread over countless papers and conference proceedings. The results achieved in the last years are promising and suggest that PPDM will achieve the goals that have been set for it. The Prospective landmark is a new period in which directed efforts toward standardization occur. At this stage, there is no consensus on privacy principles, policies, and requirements as a foundation for the development and deployment of new PPDM techniques. The excessive number of techniques is leading to confusion among developers, practitioners, and others interested in this technology. One of the most important challenges in PPDM now is to establish the groundwork for further research and development in this area.
View Selection in DW and OLAP
Authors: Cuzzocrea Alfredo
Published: May 2011

Data Warehousing (DW) systems store materialized views, data marts and data cubes, and provide nicely data exploration and analysis interfaces via OnLine Analytical Processing (OLAP) (Gray et al., 1997) and Data Mining (DM) tools and algorithms. Also, OnLine Analytical Mining (OLAM) (Han, 1997) integrates the previous knowledge discovery methodologies and offers a meaningfully convergence between OLAP and DM, thus contributing to significantly augment the power of data exploration and analysis capabilities of knowledge workers. At the storage layer, the mentioned knowledge discovery methodologies share the problem of efficiently accessing, querying and processing multidimensional data, which in turn heavily affect the performance of knowledge discovery processes at the application layer. Due to the fact that OLAP and OLAM directly process data cubes/marts, and DM is more and more encompassing methodologies that are interested to multidimensional data, the problem of efficiently representing data cubes by means of a meaningfully selected view set is become of relevant interest for the Data Warehousing and OLAP research community. This problem is directly related to the analogous problem of efficiently computing the data cube from a given relational data source (Harinarayan et al., 1996; Agarwal et al., 1996; Sarawagi et al., 1996; Zhao et al., 1997). Given a relational data source R and a target data cube schema W, the view selection problem in OLAP deals with how to select and materialize views from R in order to compute the data cube A defined by the schema W by optimizing both the query processing time, denoted by TQ, which models the amount of time required to answer a reference query-workload on the materialized view set, and the view maintenance time, denoted by TM, which models the amount of time required to maintain the materialized view set when updates occur, under a given set of constraints I that, without any loss of generality, can be represented by a space bound constraint B limiting the overall occupancy of the views to be materialized (i.e., I = ). It has been demonstrated (Gupta, 1997; Gupta & Mumick, 2005) that this problem is NP-hard, thus heuristic schemes are necessary. Heuristics are, in turn, implemented in the vest of greedy algorithms (Yang et al., 1997; Kalnis et al., 2002). In this article, we focus the attention on state-ofthe- art methods for the view selection problem in Data Warehousing and OLAP, and complete our analytical contribution with a theoretical analysis of these proposals under different selected properties that nicely model spatial and temporal complexity aspects of the investigated problem.
Ethernet Passive Optical Networks
Authors: Freire Mário M. , Monteiro Paulo P. , da Silva Henrique J.A. , Ruela José
Published: May 2011

Recently, Ethernet Passive Optical Networks (EPONs) have received a great amount of interest as a promising cost-effective solution for next-generation high-speed access networks. This is confirmed by the formation of several fora and working groups that contribute to their development, namely the EPON Forum (http://www. ieeecommunities.org/epon), the Ethernet in the First Mile Alliance (http://www.efmalliance.org), and the IEEE 802.3ah working group (http://www.ieee802. org/3/efm), which is responsible for the standardization process. EPONs are a simple, inexpensive, and scalable solution for high-speed residential access capable of delivering voice, high-speed data, and multimedia services to end users (Kramer, Mukherjee, & Maislos, 2003; Kramer & Pesavento, 2002; Lorenz, Rodrigues, & Freire, 2004; McGarry, Maier, & Reisslein, 2004; Pesavento, 2003). An EPON combines the transport of IEEE 802.3 Ethernet frames over a low-cost and broadband point-to-multipoint passive optical fibre infrastructure connecting the optical line terminal (OLT) located at the central office to optical network units (ONUs) usually located at the subscriber premises. In the downstream direction, the EPON behaves as a broadcast and select shared medium, with Ethernet frames transmitted by the OLT reaching every ONU. In the upstream direction, Ethernet frames transmitted by each ONU will only reach the OLT, but an arbitration mechanism is required to avoid collisions. This article provides an overview of EPONs focused several issues: EPON architecture, multipoint control protocol (MPCP), quality of service (QoS), and operations, administration, and maintenance (OAM) capability of EPONs.
Extracting More Bandwidth Out of Twisted Pairs of Copper Wires
Authors: Wee Hin Leo Tan , Subramaniam R.
Published: May 2011

Since the inception of the plain old telephone system (POTS) in the 1880s, it has formed the backbone of the communications world. Reliant on twisted pairs of copper wires bundled together for its operation, there has not really been any quantum jump in its transmission mode, except for its transition from analogue to digital at the end of the 1970s. Of the total bandwidth available on the copper wires, the voice portion, including the dial tone and ringing sound, occupies about 0.3 %—that is, the remaining 97.7 % is unutilized This seems to be poor resource management as prior to the advent of the Internet, telecommunication companies (telcos) have not really sought to explore better utilization of the bandwidth through technological enhancements—for example, promoting better voice quality and reducing wiring by routing two neighboring houses on the same line before splitting the last few meters. Two possible reasons could be cited for this. Advances in microelectronics and signal processing necessary for the efficient and cost-effective interlinking of computers to the telecommunications network have been rather slow (Reusens, van Bruyssel, Sevenhans, van Den Bergh, van Nimmen, & Spruyt, 2001). Also, up to about the 1990s, telcos were basically state-run behemoths which had little incentive to come out with innovative services and applications. With deregulation and liberalization of the telecommunication sector introduced in the 1990s, the entire landscape underwent a radical change that saw telcos instituting a slew of services, enhancements, innovations, and applications; in parallel, there was a surge in technological developments facilitating these. Prior to the advent of the Internet, POTS was used mainly for the transmission of voice, text, and low resolution graphics—the latter two are in relation to facsimile machines which became popular in the late 1980s. The POTS network is, however, not able to support high bandwidth applications such as multimedia and video transmission. Because of the ubiquity of POTS, it makes sense to leverage on it for upgrading purposes in order to support high bandwidth applications rather than deploy totally new networks which would need heavy investments. In recent times, asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL) has emerged as a technology that is revolutionizing telecommunications and is fast emerging as the prime candidate for broadband access to the Internet (Tan & Subramaniam, 2005). It allows for the transmission of large amounts of digital information rapidly on the POTS.
Interactive Television Research Opportunities
Authors: Prata Alcina
Published: May 2011

There is no doubt that interactive TV (iTV), which may be defined as a TV system that allows the viewer to interact with an application that is delivered simultaneously, via a digital network, in addition to the traditional TV signal (Perera, 2002), will replace traditional passive TV viewing habits. In fact, this technology enables a wide range of new interactive services, applications, and features that are becoming increasingly successful. In regard to interactive services, we have the traditional iTV service (which implies interacting with an application that is simultaneously broadcasted along with the TV program), the electronic program guide (EPG) which allows the management of the enormous amount of available channels/programs and the easy selection of them based on different criteria (title, author, date, time, genre, etc.), and Internet services which include e-mail, chat, WWW, shopping, banking, and so forth. As far as iTV applications are concerned, and following Livaditi, Vassilopoulou, Lougos, and Chorianopoulos (2003), it is possible to identify four basic categories of content: entertainment (content associated with films, series, and quizzes); information (content associated with news of all kind); transactions (content used to order/purchase goods), and communication (content that involve or require the exchange of messages). The success of iTV has mostly been due to the possibility of using different kinds of services, applications, and features through a unique and trustable device such as TV. Considering that European Internet penetration rates of around 40-60% and TV penetration rates of around 95-99% (Bates, 2003), we may anticipate a bright future for this new technology. However, as happens with any recent and emergent area, in spite all the advantages, there are many difficulties to overcome and research to be carried out. The main goal of this article is to bring together in one single source the most important research opportunities associated with iTV and, in some cases, present specific suggestions for future developments. For the purpose of this article, it is assumed that the person who interacts with an iTV system may be considered as a viewer (when viewing a traditional TV program and from a mass communication perspective) but also a User (when using the iTV application and from a Human Computer Interface - HCI - perspective). Thus, henceforth those who interact with iTV will be designated as Viewers/Users (V/Us).
Mobile Agent Authentication and Authorization
Authors: Guan Sheng-Uei
Published: May 2011

With the increasing usage of the Internet, electronic commerce (e-commerce) has been catching on fast in a lot of business areas. As e-commerce booms, there comes a demand for a better system to manage and carry out transactions. This leads to the development of agent-based e-commerce. In this new approach, agents are employed on behalf of users to carry out various e-commerce activities. Although the tradeoff of employing mobile agents is still under debate (Milojicic, 1999), using mobile agents in e-commerce attracts much research effort, as it may improve the potential of their applications in e-commerce (Guan & Yang, 1999, 2004). One advantage of using agents is that communication cost can be reduced. Agents traveling and transferring only necessary information saves network bandwidth and reduces the chances of network congestion. Also, users can schedule their agents to travel asynchronously to the destinations and collect information or execute other applications, while they can disconnect from the network (Wong, Paciorek, & Moore, 1999). Although agent-based technology offers such advantages, the major factor holding people back from employing agents is still the security issues involved. On one hand, hosts cannot trust incoming agents belonging to unknown owners, because malicious agents may launch attacks on the hosts and other agents. On the other hand, agents may also have concerns on the reliability of hosts and will be reluctant to expose their secrets to distrustful hosts. To build bilateral trust in an e-commerce environment, the authorization and authentication schemes for mobile agents should be designed well. Authentication checks the credentials of an agent before processing an agent’s requests. If the agent is found to be suspicious, the host may decide to deny its service requests. Authorization refers to the permissions granted for the agent to access whichever resources it requested.
Ubiquitous Mobile Learning in Higher Education
Authors: Lightbody Gaye
Published: May 2011

The higher education environment is changing driven by the needs of its students, evolving into a combination of different approaches (blended learning), with lectures, tutorials, and independent reading forming just one side of the overall learning encounter. A white paper from IBM (Robert, 2005) highlights some interesting viewpoints on how training programs should aim to meet the changing needs of today’s learners. They are part of the Millennial (or “Net”) Generation, brought up within a world of computers, mobile phones, and the Internet. More often, this generation of learner has little fear of present technology and in fact desires the latest electronic hi-tech advances. With such natural acceptance they have few barriers to impede the use of alternative methods, such as electronic learning (e-learning), to supplement their educational experience. As computing devices have become smaller and network accesses have become ubiquitous, the paradigm has been enhanced by the concept of mobile or m-learning. Carlson (2005) has described the Millennial generation as smart but impatient, commanding immediate results and with divided attention spans. However, there are positive observations about their self-motivation and wiliness to seek out and share resources to complement their course material. The speed at which information can be gleaned from the Internet using search engines has obvious benefits and students have grown to expect the same speed and accessibility in all facets of their lives, including education. This has created demands on education facilities to keep pace with modern living and upgrade teaching practices to make the most of technical advances. The modern student is a consumer with a more varied educational background and entrance route, and with that comes more rigorous demands on the applicability of the education they are receiving in return for their money. It is likely that this will become a driver for modern teaching practices. This article will give an introduction to some of the current research into the use of modern multimedia technologies in higher education facilities, with detail given to some approaches adopted by the University of Ulster (Lightbody, McCullagh, Weeks, & Hutchison, 2006)
Privacy, Contingency, Identity, and the Group
Authors: Hongladarom Soraj
Published: May 2011

The chapter argues that there is a way to justify privacy without relying on the metaphysical assumption of an independently existing self or person, which is normally taken to underlie personal identity. The topic of privacy is an important one in technoethics because advances in science and technology today have resulted in threats to privacy. I propose furthermore that privacy is a contingent matter, and that this conception is more convenient in helping us understand the complex issues surrounding deliberating thoughtfully about privacy in many dimensions. It is the very contingency of privacy that makes it malleable enough to serve our purposes. Basically, the argument is that it is possible for there to be a society where individuals there do not have any privacy at all, but they are still autonomous moral agents. This argument has some close affinities with the Buddhist perspective, though in this chapter I do not intend to presuppose it. Then I discuss the issue of group privacy. This is a rather neglected issue in the literature, but group privacy has become more important now that contemporary genomics and bioinformatics have the power to manipulate large amount of population data, which could lead to discrimination. The proposed conception of privacy is more suitable for justifying group privacy than the one that presupposes the inherently existing individual.
Agent-Based Negotiation in E-Marketing
Authors: Murthy V.K. , Krishnamurthy E.V.
Published: May 2011

This article describes in brief the design of agent-based negotiation system in e-marketing. Such a negotiation scheme requires the construction of a suitable set of rules, called protocol, among the participating agents. The construction of the protocol is carried out in two stages: first expressing a program into an object-based rule system and then converting the rule applications into a set of agent-based transactions on a database of active objects represented using high-level data structures.
Biometric Paradigm Using Visual Evoked Potential
Authors: Gupta Cota Navin , Palaniappan Ramaswamy
Published: May 2011

Recognizing humans based upon one’s intrinsic physical or behavioral traits has been gaining acceptance and is termed as biometrics. It involves either confirmation or denial of the identity that the user is claiming. It is especially important in ensuring security for access to highly restricted areas (for example: accessing classified documents, control gates and defence related applications). This chapter will discuss the use of brain signals at an application level exploiting the evoked potential approach for biometrics.
Completeness Concerns in Requirements Engineering
Authors: Doorn Jorge H. , Ridao Marcela
Published: May 2011

The difficulties that software developers must face to understand and elicit clients’ and users’ necessities are widely known. The more complex the context of the problem, the more difficult the elicitation of software requirements becomes. Many times, requirements engineers must become themselves problem-domain experts during the acquisition of knowledge about the context of the application. The requirements engineering (RE) objective is to systematize the process of requirements definition (Maculay, 1993; Maté & Silva, 2005; Reubenstein & Waters, 1991) along with creating a compromise among clients and users with developers since they must both participate and collaborate together. The requirements engineering process consists of three main activities: elicitation, modeling, and analysis of the application domain (Kotonya & Sommerville, 1998; Sommerville & Sawyer, 1997). Later, requirements management deals with the changes in the requirements and the irruption of new ones. RE provides methods, techniques, and tools to help requirements engineers elicit and specify requirements, ensuring their highest quality and completeness. However, the problem of completeness is a certain menace to requirements quality and casts a serious doubt on the whole RE process. Completeness is an unreachable goal, and to estimate the degree of completeness obtained at a certain step in the project is even more difficult. The requirements engineer faces a universe of discourse (UofD) that he or she will hardly ever fully know. This situation is not unique during the whole software development process since something similar happens while testing. The use of statistical models to predict the number of defects in a software artifact was successfully introduced some time ago (Petersson, Thelin, Runeson, & Wohlin, 2003). In this article, the use of capture and recapture information is applied in the RE field in order to make an estimation of the number of undiscovered requirements after a requirements elicitation process. The following section analyses the validation problem in RE. Then, a section describing the use of LEL (languageextended lexicon) and scenarios in requirements engineering is included. After that, the problem of estimating closed populations is studied. Later, the use of capture and recapture in the RE domain is introduced, and finally, some future work and conclusions are presented.
Emerging Online E-Payment and Issues of Adoption
Authors: He Qile , Duan Yanqing
Published: May 2011

Due to the rapid growth of e-commerce, the physical boundaries between parties in business transaction have been eliminated by the fast and convenient network connection. Nevertheless, most payment still has to be carried out offline by conventional methods. Over the last decade, a large number of online payment solutions have been developed, but many are still remained at the trial stage; while others are competing with each other; some even failed to reach a customer acceptance stage before developers quit the business. Reasons of slow acceptance are technological, but more importantly, societal. Developers are struggling in pushing increasingly secure and convenient technological solutions to the public. On the other side, users are seeking the balance between benefits and the risks of using online e-payment, which prolongs the process of wider acceptance. This article offers a brief introduction to typical online e-payment instruments and classifications of existing payment systems. It intends to provide researchers and developers with a clearer view on e-payment by comparing various existing systems. The article also attempts to shed light on the issue of social acceptance and adoption of online e-payment.
Genetic Algorithms in Multimodal Search Space
Authors: Gestal Marcos , Dorado Julián
Published: May 2011

Genetic algorithms (GAs) (Holland, 1975; Goldberg, 1989) try to find the solution for a problem using an initial group of individuals?the population?where each one represents a potential solution. Actually they are successfully applied in very different and actual fields (Yang, Shan, & Bui, 2008; Yu, Davis, Baydar, & Roy, 2008); nevertheless, GAs have some restrictions on a search space with more than a global solution or a unique global solution, together with multiple local optima. A classical GA faced with such a situation tends to focus the search on the surroundings of the global solution; however, it would be interesting to know a higher number of possible solutions for several reasons: precise information about the search space, easy implementation of the local solutions compared with the global one, simple interpretation of certain solutions compared with others, and so forth. To achieve that knowledge, an iterative process will be executed until reaching the desired goals. Such process will start with the grouping of the individuals into species that will independently search a solution in their environments; following, the crossover operation will involve individuals from different species in order not to leave unexplored any search space area. The process will be repeated according to the goals achieved.
Handheld Programming Languages and Environments
Authors: Hu Wen-Chen , Zuo Yanjun , Yang Chyuan-Huei Thomas , Zhong Yapin
Published: May 2011

Mobile commerce is defined as the exchange or buying and selling of commodities, services, or information on the Internet through the use of mobile, handheld devices such as smart cellular phones and PDAs (personal digital assistants). It is widely acknowledged that mobile commerce is a field of enormous potential. However, it is also commonly admitted that the development in this field is constrained. There are considerable barriers waiting to be overcome. One of the barriers is most software engineers are not familiar with the design and development of mobile applications (Kiely, 2001). This chapter gives a study of handheld computing and programming to help software engineers better understanding this subject. Handheld computing is to use handheld devices to perform wireless, mobile, handheld operations such as personal data management and making phone calls. They can be achieved by using server or client- side handheld computing and programming: • Server-side handheld computing and programming: Server-side handheld computing is to use handheld devices to perform wireless, mobile, handheld operations, which require the supports of server-side computing. The most common applications of server-side handheld programming are the mobile Web contents. • Client-side handheld computing and programming: Client-side handheld computing is to use handheld devices to perform handheld operations, which do not need the supports of server-side computing. Most client-side handheld programming languages are a version of either C/C++ or Java. Examples of the application development of Java ME, a version of Java, and Palm OS, using a version of C, will be given.
Handling Extemporaneous Information in Requirements Engineering
Authors: Kaplan Gladys N. , Doorn Jorge H.
Published: May 2011

The key of the success or failure of a software project depends on solving the right problem (Rumbaugh, 1994; Sawyer, 2005). Thus, software requirements should be correct, unambiguous, consistent, and as complete as possible (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers [IEEE], 1998). Errors in requirements raise software development and maintenance costs notoriously (Katasonov & Sakkinen, 2006). The later the requirement error is detected, the higher the correction cost turns out to be. Error correction costs have been widely studied by many researchers (Bell & Thayer, 1976; Davis, 1993). Errors in requirements may be due to several reasons such as poor communication among requirements engineers, clients, and users; poor or nonexistent requirements validation; and the level of sternness of the models being used, especially to model relevant information captured from the universe of discourse (UofD). Requirements engineering is the area of software engineering responsible for proposing and developing solutions to elicit, model, and analyze requirements by means of heuristics, guidelines, models, and processes which tend to requirements’ completeness, quality, correctness, and consistency. Many proposals have been put forward by many researchers (Bubenko & Wrangler, 1993; Jacobson, Christerson, Jonsson, & Overgaard, 1992; Leite & Oliveira, 1995; Macaulay, 1993; Reubenstein & Waters, 1991).
Histogram-Based Compression of Databases and Data Cubes
Authors: Cuzzocrea Alfredo
Published: May 2011

Histograms have been extensively studied and applied in the context of Selectivity Estimation (Kooi, 1980; Muralikrishna & DeWitt, 1998; Piatetsky-Shapiro et al., 1984; Poosala et al., 1996; Poosala, 1997), and are effectively implemented in commercial systems (e.g., Oracle Database, IBM DB2 Universal Database, Microsoft SQL Server) to query optimization purposes. In statistical databases (Malvestuto, 1993; Shoshani, 1997), histograms represent a method for approximating probability distributions. They have also been used in data mining activities, intrusion detection systems, scientific databases, that is, in all those applications which (i) operate on huge numbers of detailed records, (ii) extract useful knowledge only from condensed information consisting of summary data, (iii) but are not usually concerned with detailed information. Indeed, histograms can reach a surprising efficiency and effectiveness in approximating the actual distributions of data starting from summarized information. This has led the research community to investigate the use of histograms in the fields of database management systems (Acharya et al., 1999; Bruno et al., 2001; Gunopulos et al., 2000; Ioannidis & Poosala, 1999; Kooi, 1980; Muralikrishna & DeWitt, 1998; Piatetsky-Shapiro et al., 1984; Poosala, 1997; Poosala & Ioannidis, 1997), online analytical processing (OLAP) systems (Buccafurri et al., 2003; Cuzzocrea, 2005a; Cuzzocrea & Wang, 2007; Furfaro et al., 2005; Poosala & Ganti, 1999), and data stream management systems (Guha et al., 2001; Guha et al., 2002; Thaper et al., 2002), where, specifically, compressing data is mandatory in order to obtain fast answers and manage the endless arrival of new information, as no bound can be given to the amount of information which can be received. Histograms are data structures obtained by partitioning a data distribution (or, equally, a data domain) into a number of mutually disjoint blocks, called buckets, and then storing, for each bucket, some aggregate information of the corresponding range of values, like the sum of values in that range (i.e., applying the SQL aggregate operator SUM), or the number of occurrences (i.e., applying the SQL aggregate operator COUNT), such that this information retains a certain “summarizing content.” Figure 1 shows an instance of a histogram built on a twodimensional data cube (left-side of the figure), represented as a matrix. The corresponding (two-dimensional) histogram (right-side of the figure) is obtained by (i) partitioning the matrix into some rectangular buckets which do not overlap, and (ii) storing for each so-obtained bucket the sum of the measure attributes it contains.
IDS and IPS Systems in Wireless Communication Scenarios
Authors: Sánchez Vázquez dolfo Alan , Martínez Pérez Gregorio
Published: May 2011

In principle, computers networks were conceived to share resources and certain computing devices among a select group of people working in academic institutions. In this context, the security did not have high importance. Today, through the network circulates a lot of valuable data (budgets, credit card numbers, marketing data, etc.), much of which can be considered confidential. Here is where security takes great importance?so that these data cannot be read or modified by any third party, and the services offered are always available and only to authorized people (confidentiality, integrity, and readiness). When we refer to security, there are some terms of great importance. Risk is defined as any accidental or not prospective exhibition of information as consequence of the bad operation of hardware or the incorrect design of software. Vulnerabilities indicate when a failure in the operation of software and/or hardware elements exposes the system to penetrations. Starting from here we can define attack as an event against the good operation of a system, and it can be successful or not. If the attack is successful and access is obtained to the files and programs or control is obtained to the computers without being detected, then we are dealing with a penetration. This leads to an intrusion, which is a group of actions compromising the integrity, confidentiality, and readiness of computer resources (Sobh, 2006). The main objective of this article is to explain to the reader the main concepts regarding intrusion detection systems (IDSs) and intrusion prevention systems (IPSs), and the particular issues that should be additionally considered when protecting wireless communication scenarios (in comparison with IDSs/IPSs in traditional wired networks). It also includes an extended view of the current state of the art of IDSs and IPSs in wireless networks, covering both research works done so far in this area, as well as an analysis of current open source IDSs and IPSs, and how they are dealing with the specific requirements of wireless communication networks. This article is organized as follows: First, we start with a summary of the main related works in the background section; then we give a description of the important concepts of security, a classification of intrusion detection systems, and a brief comparative of the operation of IDSs in wired and wireless networks. Next, we highlight certain research works exemplifying efforts done so far in wireless scenarios. We present the main ideas behind our current research work to model intrusions in wireless scenarios, before offering future directions of work and a summary of the main ideas expressed in the article.
Indexing Textual Information
Authors: Kouris Ioannis N. , Makris Christos , Theodoridis Evangelos , Tsakalidis Athanasios
Published: May 2011

Information retrieval is the computational discipline that deals with the efficient representation, organization, and access to information objects that represent natural language texts (Baeza-Yates, & Ribeiro-Neto, 1999; Salton & McGill, 1983; Witten, Moûat, & Bell, 1999). A crucial subproblem in the information retrieval area is the design and implementation of efficient data structures and algorithms for indexing and searching information objects that are vaguely described. In this article, we are going to present the latest developments in the indexing area by giving special emphasis to: data structures and algorithmic techniques for string manipulation, space efficient implementations, and compression techniques for efficient storage of information objects. The aforementioned problems appear in a series of applications as digital libraries, molecular sequence databases (DNA sequences, protein databases [Gusûeld, 1997)], implementation of Web search engines, web mining and information filtering.
Information Systems Curriculum Using an Ecological Model
Authors: Tatnall Arthur , Davey Bill
Published: May 2011

To those of us involved in research and teaching in information systems (IS), it is clear that curriculum innovation and change is complex, and anything but straightforward. The amount of control that individual IS academics have over the curriculum varies between universities. In some cases there is complete control over curriculum content whereas in others just control over delivery with content determined externally. This article concentrates on the former situation but still has some relevance to the later. All curriculum innovation is complex (Fullan, 1993) due to the involvement of a large number of human actors, but in information systems curriculum change this is particularly so due to the need to consider the part played by such non-human actors (Latour, 1996) as the technology itself. We will argue that if you want to understand how IS curriculum is built, you need to use models and metaphors that relate to how people interact with each other, with the environment, and with non-human artifacts. One such approach is provided by the ecological metaphor described in this article in which we argue that systems of education may be seen as ecosystems containing interacting individuals and groups. The interactions between these will sometimes involve co-operation and sometimes competition, and may be interpreted in terms of these forces along with mechanisms for minimizing energy expenditure. In this article we will examine the application of this metaphor to curriculum change in information systems.
Integrating Natural Language Requirements Models with MDA
Authors: Leonardi María Carmen , Mauco María Virginia
Published: May 2011

The model driven architecture (MDA) is a framework for software development defined by the OMG (Object Management Group, 2006). The MDA initiative shifts the focus of software development from writing code to building models, separating the specification of functionality from the speci- fication of the specific implementation of that functionality (Miller & Mukerji, 2003). Key to MDA is the importance of models and transformations between them in the software development process. The first model of MDA is the computation independent model (CIM), which describes the business model independently of the software system to be implemented. The CIM is described with a vocabulary that is familiar to stakeholders. As it captures the domain without reference to a particular system implementation or technology, the CIM would remain the same even if the system were implemented mechanically, rather than in computer software (Meservy & Fenstermacher, 2005). CIM reduces the gap between stakeholders and software engineers (Miller et al., 2003). Recently, some proposals related to business modeling and MDA have appeared, for example, the use of activity diagrams (Mersevy et al., 2005), BPMN (White, 2004), or goal-oriented strategies (Birol, 2006). Several authors agree in the importance of using the “language of the business experts” (Francis, 2006) during the first stages of development, enhancing communication between the domain experts domain and software engineers. From the requirements engineering area, we have been working with natural language requirements models to describe the universe of discourse (Leite, Hadad, Doorn, & Kaplan, 2000). But, to fit in MDA framework, we have to map them into object-oriented models, defining a CIM that will be the basis for a MDA software development. To do this, we have proposed a transformation strategy and developed its associated tool, CIMTool, thus allowing the integration of the natural language models into the MDA framework. In this article, which is an integration of Leonardi (2003), Leonardi (2005), Leonardi and Mauco (2004), and Leonardi, Mauco, and Leoni (2005), we present the overall strategy defining OCL based transformation rules to derive a CIM from the language extended lexicon (LEL) and the scenario model (Leite et al., 2000).