bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
How Corporate Portals Support Innovation
Authors: Gordon Steven , Tarafdar Monideepa
Published: May 2011

The ability of a company to be innovative depends on many factors, such as a culture amenable to risk taking (Kontoghiorghes, Awbre, & Feurig, 2005), a managerial attitude favorable toward change (Damanpour, 1991), a market orientation (Hult, Hurley, & Knight, 2004), committed champions (Howell, 2005), and an adequate supply of physical and financial resources for research (Delbecq & Mills, 1985). In addition, the innovation process requires organizational and technical competences in knowledge management, collaboration, and communication (Carneiro, 2000; McAdam, 2000; Zakaria, Amelinckx, & Wilemon, 2004,). Corporate portals are central to achieving these competences. This article describes how corporate portals can support innovation in organizations through the enhancement of knowledge management, communication, and collaboration.
Information Visualization
Authors: Wojkowski Wita
Published: May 2011

Information visualization refers to technologies that support visualization and help in the interpretation of information. These technologies include digital images, graphical user interfaces, animations, three dimensional presentations, geographic information systems, virtual reality, and of course, tables and graphs. All of these visualization techniques might be used in enterprise portals where the portal user often handles large amounts of data of different types, from many different sources, and utilizes various software tools. Information visualization helps enterprise portal users understand and interpret complex information, and most importantly, helps identify relationships. That is, information visualization allows portal users to study information in a new way which can lead to novel insights.
Ontologies in Portal Design
Authors: Bhojaraju G. , Buck Sarah
Published: May 2011

Portals are becoming more and more ubiquitous on the Internet and that is why their architecture is a topic of concern among domain stakeholders. In order to ensure a solid architecture in portal design, ontologies must be considered as a necessary agent of design. An ontology provides a classification system for all the data and metadata in a domain. Ontologies supply metadata in order to bring about a streamlined delivery of information to users. While portals exist in order to assist users gain access to information, ontologies enhance portals by providing access to relevant information.
The Portal as Information Broker
Authors: Lamp John
Published: May 2011

The term information broker is widely used in the area of library and information science to describe a middle agent who deals in information as a commodity, enabling customers to gain more efficient access to quality data. The role of this middle agent is described as “information retrieval and information organisation” (Rugge & Glossbrenner, 1995). The role of the broker is to bring additional organisation to the market by lowering search costs (Palmer & Lindemann, 2003).
Portals for Development and Use of Guidelines and Standards
Authors: Partarakis N.
Published: May 2011

Nowadays, guidelines and standards play a key role in the adoption of (computer) technologies by industries and society. In essence, they constitute a rapidly evolving medium for transferring established and de facto knowledge to various guidelines and standards in order to achieve consistency and user-friendliness of user interfaces, especially in cases where complex and rapidly evolving technologies are employed. Despite the indisputable value and importance of such knowledge, several studies investigating the use of guidelines and standards by designers and developers (e.g., Wandke & Hüttner, 2001) have concluded that they are frequently ignored. This is attributed partly to the fact that such knowledge is not easily exploitable (Tetzlaff & Schwartz, 1991), and partly to their incarnation medium (i.e., paper based-manuals) that usually raises issues of ineffectiveness and lack of user-friendliness (e.g., Bevan & Macleod, 1994).
Power and Politics in University Portal Implementation
Authors: Peszynski Konrad J.
Published: May 2011

Authors in the information systems (IS) discipline have started exploring the socio-technical approach to the development and implementation of information systems (Mitev, 2001; Orlikowski, 1992; Peszynski, 2005). However, few have extended this exploration into the realm of Web portals. Previous studies have explored process-oriented models and the categorical critical success factors associated with broad systems selection and implementation (Avison & Fitzgerald, 2003; Davis, 1974; Hoffer, Valacich, & George, 1998).
Providing Rating Services and Subscriptions with Web Portal Infrastructures
Authors: Galitsky Boris , Levene Mark
Published: May 2011

A Web infrastructure (portals) for providing online rating of services such as financial services, are becoming more popular nowadays. A rating portal providing comparisons between competitive services has the potential of becoming a well-established Web enterprise. For some services, the comparison is performed based on a set of measurable values such as performance and price, for example, when the service involves computer hardware. In such an environment, services can make a rational decision whether they wish to advertise on the portal based on the set of measurable values (compare with Tennenholtz, 1999). However, for some services like banking, brokerage, and other financial services characterised by such parameters as customer support quality, it is impossible to establish an objective set of measurable values. In these cases, the rating portals publish their scores for the competing businesses based on their own private estimation strategy. We believe that evolution of the interactions between the agents being rated and rating agents is an important social process, which is worth examining thorough simulation.
Provision of Product Support through Enterprise Portals
Authors: Searle Ian
Published: May 2011

Many enterprises make extensive use of the Internet, both for promoting their profile with the general public and for conducting aspects of their business operations. We have identified the following uses that enterprises have for their public-facing portals, those portals that are available to any user of the Internet.
Semantic Community Portals
Authors: O’Murchu Ina , Zhdanova Anna V. , Breslin John G.
Published: May 2011

Many virtual communities have surfaced and come together on the World Wide Web. Web-based community portals serve as a one-stop place for all information needs serving a group of users that have common interests. As organizations become highly dynamic and the people that join them become more geographically dispersed, the need for improved ways to share and distribute data and information amongst the community or organization members has increased dramatically.
Semantic Web Implications for Web Portals
Authors: Kamthan Pankaj
Published: May 2011

A Web portal is a gateway to the information and services on the Web, where its users can interchange and share information. In their brief lifetime, Web portals have benefited various sectors of the society and found widespread use (Jafari & Sheehan, 2003; Tatnall, 2005). By careful aggregation of information, Web portals simplify access, as well as decrease the time and effort of locating resources on topical themes. In doing so, they have created a sense of community with common interests.
Spatio-Temporal Portals for Continuously Changing Network Nodes
Authors: Yu Byunggu , Gamboa Ruben
Published: May 2011

OGSA is a service-oriented architecture (SOA); that is, server nodes in the grid advertise the services they offer, client nodes use the grid to find servers that meet their specific requirements, but neither server nodes nor client nodes are closely tied to each other. When a client has a request, the grid infrastructure identifies a set of the servers that can fulfill the request: OGSA grid is based on platform-neutral technologies and, given a request, identifies appropriate servers directly by the interfaces (i.e., services) they offer.
User Acceptance Affecting the Adoption of Enterprise Portals
Authors: Moeller Steffen
Published: May 2011

The implementation of enterprise portals has been cited as the most important business information project of the next decade (Collins, 1999; Daniel & Ward, 2005). However, introducing enterprise portals can cause resistance and confusion among users. Often, portals provide a completely new work environment based on new user interfaces structuring content, services, and applications in a very different manner (Kakamanu & Mezzacca, 2005; Shilakes & Tylman, 1998). In addition, enterprise portals often provide new functions and features that, at first, can overload the user.
Watermarking Integration into Portals
Authors: Wolf Patrick
Published: May 2011

Digital watermarking has become an accepted security technology to protect media such as images, audio, video, 3-D, or even text-based documents (Cox & Miller, 2002). Watermarking algorithms embed information into media data by imperceptible changes of the media. They enable copyright or integrity protection, broadcast monitoring, and various other applications. Depending on targeted application and media type, various concepts and approaches for digital watermarking exist.
Web Museums as the Last Endeavor
Authors: Bernier Roxane
Published: May 2011

In the 19th century, the museum was generally constituted as an accumulation of uncatalogued objects, while its fundamental role was relatively haphazard, with principal concern the elite’s good taste and high culture provided within a sacred site. At this time, heritage organizations began serving as a pedagogical source and incorporated learning strategies to accommodate the general public. Influenced by the Arts and Craft Movement, the Industrial Revolution brought an art education awareness, which first flourished in European museums, and then emerged after the Civil War in the United States—principally between 1870 and the Wall Street crash of 1929—for studying important artworks and supporting art appreciation through a constructivist perspective (Zeller, 1989). Some scholars posit that constructivism is the most convenient way to subjectively gain understanding, by involving visitors as active learners beyond the traditional approach (Hein, 1998). Earlier than the Second World War, the Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York (www. metmuseum.org) was already known as a leader for setting educational programs with unique behind scenes of major masterpieces (see Figure 1), whereas the Louvre in Paris (www.louvre.fr) rapidly acted as a model in the Victorian Era for other established museums throughout the continent. Both Web museums of these organizations have shown creative ways of displaying their contents and for attracting an international crowd.
Web Portal Application Development Technologies
Authors: Sampaio Américo
Published: May 2011

The growth of the Internet and the World Wide Web has contributed to significant changes in many areas of our society. The Web has provided new ways of doing business, and many companies have been offering new services as well as migrating their systems to the Web. The main goal of the first Web sites was to facilitate the sharing of information between computers around the world. These Web sites were mainly composed of simple hypertext documents containing information in text format and links to other documents that could be spread all over the world. The first users of this new technology were university researchers interested in some easier form of publishing their work, and also searching for other interesting research sources from other universities.
Web Portal for Genomic and Epidemiologic Medical Data
Authors: Miguélez Rico Mónica
Published: May 2011

Medical data and digital imaging for medical diagnosis currently represent a very important research area in computer science. The generation of medical information is continuously increasing. More specifically, genomic (molecular and histological) data and images have become key points for diagnosis. The specific processing these data require is more and more requested.
Web Portals as an Exemplar for Tourist Destinations
Authors: Rowe Michelle , Pease Wayne , McLeod Pauline
Published: May 2011

Continuing on from an earlier article in this publication that considers portals and their relevance to destination tourism, this article investigates the case study of the Margaretriver.com Web portal. Margaretriver.com is based on a brokerage model of portals and this structure has been important to its development. Also critical to its success is the collective approach taken by small and medium tourist enterprises (SMTEs) as they have coalesced around shared assets that belong to the region.
Widgets as Personalised Mini-Portals
Authors: Nikakis Con
Published: May 2011

Wikipedia (Wikipedia, 2006) describes the term widget as a “... general purpose term, or placeholder name, for any unspecified device, including those that have not yet been invented” (Widgets, 2006) with the origin of the term attributed to the 1924 play “Beggar on Horseback,” by George Kaufman and Marc Connelly (Kaufman & Connelly, 1924), where it was used to describe a product manufactured by one of the characters.
WSRP Specification and Alignment
Authors: Polgar Jana , Polgar Tony
Published: May 2011

The WSRP specification (WSRP specification version 1, 2003) requires that every producer implement two required interfaces, and allows optional implementation of two others: 1. Service Description Interface (Required): This interface allows a WSRP producer to advertise services and its capabilities to consumers. A WSRP consumer can use this interface to query a producer to discover what user-facing services the producer offers. Furthermore, the description also contains additional metadata and technical capabilities of the producer. The producer’s metadata might include information about whether the producer requires registration or cookie initialization before a consumer can interact with any of the remote portlets. For the consumer, this interface can be used as a discovery means to determine and localize the set of offered remote portlets. 2. Markup Interface (Required): This interface allows a consumer to interact with a remotely running portlet supplied by the producer. For example, a consumer would use this interface to perform some interaction when an end-user submits a form from the portal page. Since this interface supports the notion of the state, the portal might obtain the latest markup based on the current state of the portlet (for example, when the user clicks refresh button or interaction with another portlet on the same page takes place). 3. Registration Interface (Optional): This interface serves as a mechanism for opening a dialogue between the producer and consumer so that they can exchange information about each others’ technical capabilities. The registration interface allows a producer to ask consumers to provide additional information before they start interaction with the service through the service description interface and markup interfaces. This mechanism enables a producer to customize its interaction with a specific type of consumer. For example, a producer may use a filter and reduce the number of offered portlets for a particular consumer. 4. Portlet Management Interface (Optional): This interface gives the consumer control over the life-cycle methods of the remote portlet. A consumer acquires the ability to customize a portlet’s behavior, or destroy an instance of a remote portlet using this interface.
Ethics of Cyber War Attacks
Authors: Rowe Neil C.
Published: May 2011

Offensive cyber warfare raises serious ethical problems for societies, problems that need to be addressed by policies. Since cyber weapons are so different from conventional weapons, the public is poorly informed about their capabilities and may endorse extreme ethical positions in either direction on their use. Cyber weapons are difficult to precisely target given the interdependence of most computer systems, so collateral damage to civilian targets is a major danger, as when a virus aimed at military sites spreads to civilian sites. Damage assessment is difficult for cyber war attacks, since most damage is hidden inside data; this encourages massive attacks in the hopes of guaranteeing some damage. Damage repair may be difficult, especially for technologically primitive victim countries. For these reasons, some cyber war attacks may be prosecutable as war crimes. In addition, cyber-war weapons are expensive and tend to lose effectiveness quickly after use as they lose the element of surprise, so the weapons are not cost effective.
International Outsourcing, Personal Data, and Cyber Terrorism
Authors: St.Amant Kirk
Published: May 2011

An individual’s personal information can be a valuable commodity to terrorists. With such data, terrorists can engage in a variety of illicit activities including creating false bank accounts, procuring various official documents or even creating mass panic. Unfortunately, such personal data is generally easy to access, exchange, or collect via online media including Web sites, chat rooms, or e-mails. Moreover, certain common business practices, particularly those related to data processing in international outsourcing, can facilitate such activities by placing personal information into a legal grey area that makes it easy to misuse. For these reasons, organizations and individuals need to be aware of the potential for such data misuse as well as be informed of steps they can take to curtail such abuses. This essay examines the privacy/data abuse problems related to international outsourcing and presents approaches designed to prevent the misuse of personal information by cyber terrorists.
Electronic Surveillance and Civil Rights
Authors: Curran Kevin , McIntyre Steven , Meenan Hugo , Heaney Ciaran
Published: May 2011

Modern technology is providing unprecedented opportunities for surveillance. Employers can read e-mail, snoop on employee’s computer files, and eavesdrop on their calls. Many companies also have cameras monitoring their employees all day. Since employees do not usually have access to their own electronically stored data, they cannot correct inaccurate information. Strangely, this type of information gathering is not illegal even if it is done unbeknownst to an employee. This is because there are no laws regulating electronic surveillance in the private sector workplace. This chapter presents an overview of electronic surveillance and civil liberties.
Behavioral Information Security
Authors: Fagnot Isabelle J.
Published: May 2011

The effectiveness of information security can be substantially limited by inappropriate and destructive human behaviors within an organization. As recent critical security incidents have shown, successful insider intrusions induce a fear of repeated disruptive behaviors within organizations, and can be more costly and damaging than outsider threats. Today, employees compose the majority of end-users. The wide variety of information that they handle in a multitude of work and non-work settings brings new challenges to organizations and drives technological and managerial change. Several areas of studies such as behavioral information security, information security governance and social engineering to name a few, have emerged in an attempt to understand the phenomena and suggest countermeasures and responses. This paper starts by defining behavioral information security and provides examples of security behaviors that have an impact on the overall security of an organization. Threats’ mitigations are then depicted followed by future trends.
Identification Through Data Mining
Authors: Liberati Diego
Published: May 2011

Four main general purpose approaches inferring knowledge from data are presented as a useful pool of at least partially complementary techniques also in the cyber intrusion identification context. In order to reduce the dimensionality of the problem, the most salient variables can be selected by cascading to a K-means a Divisive Partitioning of data orthogonal to the Principal Directions. A rule induction method based on logical circuits synthesis after proper binarization of the original variables proves to be also able to further prune redundant variables, besides identifying logical relationships among them in an understandable “if . then ..” form. Adaptive Bayesian networks are used to build a decision tree over the hierarchy of variables ordered by Minimum Description Length. Finally, Piece-Wise Affine Identification also provides a model of the dynamics of the process underlying the data, by detecting possible switches and changes of trends on the time course of the monitoring.
Taxonomy for Computer Security Incidents
Authors: Kiltz Stefan , Lang Andreas , Dittmann Jana
Published: May 2011

The adaptation and extension is necessary to apply the CERT-taxonomy to malware in order to categorise the threat (e.g., Trojan horses, Viruses etc.) as a basis for countermeasures. For the adaptation of the taxonomy to include malware a new entry in the tools section is needed (malicious software). This entry will cover the Trojan horses mentioned earlier. The proposed extension of the CERT-taxonomy will include the attacker-model, the vulnerability and the objectives. Within the attacker-model a new entry should be added, the security scan. This type of penetration testing by security-experts is similar to the works done by ‘white hat’- hackers. However, such penetration testing is done by contractors on request, within strict margins concerning ethics and the assessment of potential damages before such testing takes place. The objectives within the CERT-taxonomy need a supplement, the security evaluation. This of course is the addition necessary to complement the introduction of the security scan. A very important vulnerability, social engineering, should be added to the taxonomy as well. It describes a very effective way to attack an IT-System. Two types can be distinguished, social engineering with the use of computers (e.g. e-mail content, phishing) and social engineering using human-based methods (e.g. dumpster diving, impostors).
Adaptive Routing Quality of Service Algorithms for Internet's Irregular Traffic
Authors: Mellouk Abdelhamid
Published: May 2011

Networks, such as the Internet, have become the most important communication infrastructure of today’s society. It enables the worldwide users (individual, group, and organizational) to access and exchange remote information scattered over the world. Currently, due to the growing needs in telecommunications (Void, video-conference, Void, etc.) and the diversity of transported flows, the Internet network does not meet the requirements of the future integrated-service networks that carry multimedia data traffic with a high quality of service (QoS). The main drivers of this evolution are the continuous growth of the bandwidth requests, the promise of cost improvements, and finally the possibility of increasing profits by offering new services.
Data Caching in Web Applications
Authors: Shan Tony C. , Hua Winnie W.
Published: May 2011

Nowadays, the eCommerce business models demand increasingly higher performance of information systems that support various business processes. Higher levels of service at a lower cost must be provided by the Information Technology (IT) group to help the business to compete and succeed in a global economy. IT has to find a way to extend the current infrastructure in an organization and get the most out of the existing investments by applying innovative solutions. One of the most valuable innovations is scalable data management.
Malicious Software
Authors: Chen Thomas M. , Tally Gregg W.
Published: May 2011

Malicious software (malware) allows an intruder to take over or damage a target host without the owner’s consent and often without his or her knowledge. Over the past thirty years, malware has become a more serious worldwide problem as Internet-connected computers have proliferated and operating systems have become more complex. Today, the average PC user must be more cognizant of computer security than ever before due to the constant threat of possible infection. Although exact costs are difficult to determine, there is little doubt that malware has widespread impact on equipment damages, loss of data, and loss of productivity. According to surveys, malware is one of the most common and costly types of attack on organizations (CERT, CSO, and ECTF, 2005).
Network Optimization Using Evolutionary Algorithms in Multicast Transmission
Authors: Donoso Yezid , Fabregat Ramón
Published: May 2011

To support QoS in today’s Internet, several new architecture models have been proposed (Striegel, A., & Manimaran, G. (2002)). Traffic engineering has become a key issue within these new architectures, as supporting QoS requires more sophisticated resource management tools. Traffic engineering aims to optimize the performance of operational networks. The main objective is to reduce congestion hot spots and improve resource utilization. This can be achieved by setting up explicit routes through the physical network in such a way that the traffic distribution is balanced across several traffic trunks. This load balancing technique can be achieved by multicommodity network flow (Pioro, M., & Medhi, D. (2004)) formulation. This leads to the traffic being shared over multiple routes between the ingress node and the egress nodes in order to avoid link saturation and hence the possibility of congestion, which is the inability to transmit a volume of information with the established capacities for a particular equipment or network.
Optimizing Inter-Domain Internet Multicast
Authors: Guo Huaqun , Ngoh Lek-Heng , Wong Wai-Choong
Published: May 2011

In the age of multimedia and high-speed networks, there are many applications that involve sending information to a selective, usually large, number of clients. Common examples of such applications include audio/video conferencing, distance learning, video-on-demand, distributed interactive games, data distribution, service location/discovery, collaborative computing, collaborative visualization, distributed simulation, communicating to dynamic group, and so on. To support such applications, multicast is considered a very efficient mechanism (Lao 2005) since it uses some delivery structures to forward data from senders to receivers, with the aim that the overall utilization of resources in the underlying network is minimized in some sense (Oliveira 2005). For example, multicast is heavily used for mass media TV distribution which can be seen from a survey conducted by NAB Research and Planning (NAB 2005). NAB Research and Planning conducted this survey in July 2005 of all U.S. full-power commercial television stations on their plans for DTV (Digital TV) multicast services. Among the 450 response stations, 50% of stations are currently multicasting, and 79% among non-multicasting stations are considering multicasting at some point in the future.
Positive-Feedback Preference Model of the Internet Topology
Authors: Zhou Shi
Published: May 2011

This chapter introduces a recently proposed Internet model, namely the positive-feedback preference (PFP) model (Zhou & Mondragón, 2004a). The model is a precise and complete Internet topology generator, which accurately reproduces the largest set of important characteristics of the Internet topology at the autonomous systems (AS) level.
Quality of Service in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks
Authors: Seah Winston K.G. , Tan Hwee-Xian
Published: May 2011

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) form a class of multi-hop wireless networks that can easily be deployed on-the-fly. These are autonomous systems that do not require existing infrastructure; each participating node in the network acts as a host as well as a packet-forwarding router. In addition to the difficulties experienced by conventional wireless networks, such as wireless interference, noise and obstructions from the environment, hidden/exposed terminal problems, and limited physical security, MANETs are also characterized by dynamically changing network topology and energy constraints.
Rich-Club Phenomenon of the Internet Topology
Authors: Zhou Shi
Published: May 2011

This chapter introduces a recently discovered structure of the Internet, namely the rich-club phenomenon (Zhou & Mondragón, 2004a). The significance of this discovery is that an appreciation of the rich-club phenomenon is essential for a proper examination of global Internet characteristics, such as routing efficiency, network flexibility, and robustness (Zhou & Mondragón, 2004b). Today, rich-club connectivity has been adopted by the networks research community as a topology metric to characterise the Internet structure (Mahadevan et al., 2005).
Scaling Properties of Network Traffic
Authors: Rincón David , Sallent Sebastià
Published: May 2011

The availability of good stochastic models of network traffic is the key to developing protocols and services. A precise statistical characterization of packet interarrival time, size distribution, and connection arrival rate help network engineers to design network equipment and evaluate its performance.
Survey
Authors: Gutiérrez Jairo A.
Published: May 2011

One of the keys for the success of ubiquitous network services is the issue of assigning prices to those services. Furthermore, ubiquitous services based on a network of complementary technologies, both fixed and wireless, have created the expectation of services that can be obtained dynamically and automatically with the minimum possible of interaction between the users and potentially complex network systems. Intelligent agents would negotiate the best conditions to make sure the user obtains the best possible connection always (Voinov & Valladares, 2003). This best possible connection would be selected by comparing the different services, quality of the services offered, and prices, then reaching a decision based on the policies the user has configured in his or her intelligent agent and in conjunction with the policies being presented by the different service providers.
TCP Enhancements for Mobile Internet
Authors: Sardar Bhaskar , Saha Debashis
Published: May 2011

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), the most popular transport layer communication protocol for the Internet, was originally designed for wired networks, where bit error rate (BER) is low and congestion is the primary cause of packet loss. Since mobile access networks are prone to substantial noncongestive losses due to high BER, host motion and handoff mechanisms, they often disturb the traffic control mechanisms in TCP. So the research literature abounds in various TCP enhancements to make it survive in the mobile Internet environment, where mobile devices face temporary and unannounced loss of network connectivity when they move. Mobility of devices causes varying, increased delays and packet losses. TCP incorrectly interprets these delays and losses as sign of network congestion and invokes unnecessary control mechanisms, causing degradation in the end-to-end good put rate. This chapter provides an in-depth survey of various TCP enhancements which aim to redress the above issues and hence are specifically targeted for the mobile Internet applications.
Traffic Control
Authors: Chen Thomas M.
Published: May 2011

Networks are designed to handle a certain amount of traffic with an acceptable level of network performance. Network performance will deteriorate if the offered traffic exceeds the given network capacity. Packets will suffer long queuing delays at congested nodes and possibly packet loss if buffers overflow. Traffic control within the network regulates traffic flows for the purpose of maintaining adequate network performance during conditions of congestion. The Internet currently has a simple approach—dropping IP packets during congestion—but will evolve to more sophisticated traffic controls in the future.
Voice Over Internet Protocol
Authors: Bose Indranil , Chun Fong Man
Published: May 2011

One of the hottest technologies these days is voice communication over packet-switched data networks. This is known as voice over Internet protocol (VoIP). Hardy (2003) defines VoIP as “the interactive voice exchange capability carried over packet switched transport employing the Internet protocol.” With VoIP, voice signal from the sender is digitized into packets that are transmitted to the receiver through a network,which often includes the Internet. As the Internet is a free resource, the communication cost of VoIP is much lower than that of traditional telephone systems. This is a major advantage of VoIP. VoIP system also increases the efficiency and service quality of businesses. As a result of VoIP, many advanced applications can be built and these include unified messaging, video conferencing, and ring list. But VoIP is not without its limitations. Its main drawback is low reliability. It also suffers from uncertain quality of voice transmission. In addition, it cannot guarantee security because it uses public networks. Although the idea of VoIP was known from the 1970s, it did not become commercially viable until 1995, when Vocaltec became the first company to produce the first commercially available VoIP product (Varshney et al., 2002).
Reducing Transaction Costs with GLW Infrastructure
Authors: Brandão Soares Marcus Vinicius
Published: May 2011

This chapter introduces the hybrid GLW information infrastructure as an alternative to proprietary-only information infrastructures with lower costs. The author argues that the use of FLOSS servers in a client- server infrastructure reduces the transaction costs relative to the data processing and the contract management that organizations have to support, preserving the investment already made with the installed base of clients in comparison to the use of proprietary managed servers. Transaction costs of two realworld proprietary infrastructures, Netware 5.0 and Windows NT 4.0, and of GLW, all with Windows 98 clients, are described and compared to give elements for the reader to analyze and decide.
Investing in Open Source Software Companies
Authors: Puhakka Mikko , Jungman Hannu , Seppänen Marko
Published: May 2011

This chapter studies how venture capitalists invest in open source-based companies. Evaluation and valuation of knowledge-intensive companies is a challenge to investors, and while many methods exist for evaluating traditional knowledge-intensive companies, the rise of open source companies with new hard-to-measure value propositions such as developer communities brings new complexity to dealmaking. The chapter highlights some experiences that venture capitalists have had with open source companies. The authors hope that the overview of venture capital process and methodology as well as two case examples will provide both researchers and entrepreneurs new insights into how venture capitalists work and make investments.
Collaboration Methods and Tools for Operational Risk Management
Authors: van Grinsven Jürgen H.M. , Janssen Marijn , de Vries Henk
Published: May 2011

In this article, collaboration methods and tools are discussed for supporting multiple expert judgement issues. First, an overview of ORM will be provided by discussing the main phases of ORM. Second collaboration methods and tools are presented that can be used to support the multiple experts’ judgment and elicitation process and the role of experts is discussed. Finally research issues are discussed that need to be solved to leverage the full advantages of collaboration methods and tools as well as future developments.
An E-Collaboration Overview of Behavior and its Relationship with Evolutionary Factors
Authors: Garza Vanessa
Published: May 2011

The collaboration of individuals across large geographic distances began some time ago, perhaps as far back as the 19th century, with the invention of the telegraph, due to its significant impact on communication (Teresko, 2000). Today, with the increased use of computers, the Internet, and the World Wide Web, electronic communication (e-communication), as well as electronic collaboration (e-collaboration) offer individuals around the world the possibility of working together. The wide use of tools such as e-mail and instant messaging, among others, captured the attention of scholars, who began searching for theories that could explain the behavior surrounding the use of electronic media (Kock, 2005b; Simon, 2006).
Impact of Collaborative Delivery of Enterprise ICT Services
Authors: Vorisek Jiri , Feuerlicht George
Published: May 2011

Most organizations today are looking for more cost effective approaches to delivering enterprise applications to their user base. Among the alternatives that are becoming increasingly popular are various forms of e-collaboration that involve the sharing of information between organizations, integration of interenterprise business processes among partner organizations, and the delivery of software services by external application service providers (ASPs). Such recent trends are likely to produce a situation where most enterprise applications will be implemented collaboratively or supplied as services, making the Software-as-a-Service model the dominant method of enterprise application delivery. The extensive use of externally supplied software and information services will change the shape of the ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) market and impact on management decisions about the deployment of enterprise ICT (Harber, 2004). These changes will affect both user organizations and organizations supplying ICT products and services. In this paper we analyze the above trends and discuss the impact of the Software-as-a-Service model on ICT user organizations and ICT suppliers. We first discuss the key enterprise computing trends and the strategic importance of ICT.
Implementing Varied Discussion Forums in E-Collaborative Learning Environments
Authors: Du Jianxia , Pate George
Published: May 2011

Creating quality online instruction is a challenging task for most online instructors, with promoting engaging online discussions being the most difficult part of the instruction. Instructors frequently struggle with creating online discussions that will promote “critical thinking skills” (Toledo, 2006, p. 150) in an asynchronous environment instead of simply presenting dead-end questions that go nowhere. This article will review several suggested variances in online discussions that allow engaged critical thinking, promote subject matter understanding along with group member and individual online discussion participation, and assist instructors in choosing appropriate methods for their particular instructional goals.
Interaction and Context in Service-Oriented E-Collaboration Environments
Authors: Dorn Christoph , Dustdar Schahram , Giuliani Giovanni , Gombotz Robert , Ning Ke , Peray Sébastien , Reiff-Marganiec Stephan , Schall Daniel , Tilly Marcel
Published: May 2011

As it has been observed in the recent decade, collaborating teams become ever more unstable, less tightly coupled and more distributed and mobile. Workers participate in multiple teams that pursue different goals that need not be related in any way. This radical way in which the workplace is changing for the individual and the team requires highly adaptable groupware and intelligent support for the individual in order to minimize the time lost for management and coordination when switching between different teams, different workspaces, and different contexts. Thus, a service-oriented approach seems promising to provide individual, context-aware building blocks for adaptable groupware.
Interrelationships between Web-GIS and E-Collaboration Research
Authors: Masucci Michele
Published: May 2011

Geographic information systems (GIS) refers to the computer hardware and software that supports the management and analysis of spatial information. There has been a recent increase in the development of Internet accessible GIS applications, called Web- GIS (Al-Kodmany, 2001; Carver, Evans, Kingston, & Turton, 2000). Web-GIS facilitates participation among stakeholders through disseminating user interfaces for storing, accessing, and analyzing spatial information using the Internet (Al-Kodmany, 2001; Carver et al., 2000; Dragicevic & Balram, 2004). Participatory and community GIS approaches focus on system design that supports collaboration among organizations serving and representing interests of many constituent groups, including nontechnical users (Carver, 2003; Craig, Harris, & Weiner, 2002; Drew, 2003; Elwood & Ghose, 2004; Elwood & Leitner, 2003; Ghose, 2005; Ghose& Elwood, 2003; Kyem, 2004; Seiber, 2003).
A Research Agenda for Identity Work and E-Collaboration
Authors: Hayes Niall , Chiasson Mike
Published: May 2011

Many recent management programmes have sought to establish organisation-wide collaborations that connect people in different functional and occupation groups (Blackler, Crump, & McDonald, 2000). Typically, these programmes are made possible through the deployment and use of e-collaboration technologies such as groupware, workflow systems, intranets, extranets, and the internet (Ciborra, 1996; Hayes, 2001). Examples of these technologies include the use of shared folders for reports, coauthored documents, completed electronic forms, and discussion forums. Through the use of such technologies, work and views are made accessible to staff working within and between functional and occupational groups. Such management programmes are reported to have brought about significant changes in the nature of work within and between intra organizational boundaries, including the erosion of functional and community boundaries (Blackler et al., 2000; Easterby-Smith, Crossan, & Nicolini, 2000; Knights & Willmott, 1999).
Towards a Collaborative Educational Game Model
Authors: Ferreira Teixeira Jeane Silva , de Jesus Viana Sá Eveline , Prudêncio Lopes Tatiane Macedo , Costa Inaldo Capistrano , Moreira Silveira D’Ilton , Ramos de Oliveira Alessandro , Torres Fernandes Clovis , Parente de Oliveira José Maria
Published: May 2011

In a collaborative learning process, concept learning may happen simultaneously with the practice of sociable attitudes and essential values, motivating the learner in the knowledge acquisition process. Among the tools that are likely to help reinforcing the learner motivation, both in and out of classroom settings, are computer games, especially the ones played interactively by two or more players, known as collaborative games, A collaborative game used as an educational tool in classroom settings or at a distance, integrated to appropriate pedagogic practices, is a collaborative educational game. Aspects as ludic engagement, competitiveness and interactivity inherent to collaborative educational games may deepen children and youngsters’ motivation to learn, helping to make the learning process more effective (Prensky, 2001).
Wikis as Tools for Collaboration
Authors: Klobas Jane
Published: May 2011

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, envisioned it as a place where “people can communicate … by sharing their knowledge in a pool … putting their ideas in, as well as taking them out” (Berners- Lee, 1999). For much of its first decade, the Web was, however, primarily a place where the majority of people took ideas out rather than putting them in. This has changed. Many “social software” services now exist on the Web to facilitate social interaction, collaboration and information exchange. This article introduces wikis, jointly edited Web sites and Intranet resources that are accessed through web browsers. After a brief overview of wiki history, we explain wiki technology and philosophy, provide an overview of how wikis are being used for collaboration, and consider some of the issues associated with management of wikis before considering the future of wikis.
Academic Activities Based on Personal Networks Deployment
Authors: Kaldanis V.
Published: May 2011

Personal networking has already become an increasingly important aspect of the unbounded connectivity in heterogeneous networking environments. Particularly, personal networks (PNs) based on mobile ad-hoc networking have seen recently a rapid expansion, due to the evolution of wireless devices supporting different radio technologies. Bluetooth can be considered as the launcher of the self-organizing net-working in the absence of fixed infrastructure, forming pico nets or even scatternets. Similar other wireless technologies (e.g., WiFi) attract a lot of attention in the context of mobile ad hoc networks, due to the high bandwidth flexibility and QoS selection ranges they feature, leveraging the path to develop advanced services and applications destined to the end user and beyond. Furthermore, personal networks are expected to provide a prosperous business filed for exploitation to third-party telecom players such as service and content providers, application developers, integrators, and so forth. In this article, a personal-to-nomadic networking case is presented. Academic PN (AcPN) is a generic case that aims to describe several situations of daily communication activities within a university campus or an extended academic environment through the support of the necessary technological background in terms of communication technologies. The concept is straightforward: a number of mobile users with different characteristics and communication requirements ranging from typical students to instructors and lecturers, researchers and professors, as well as third parties (e.g., visitors, campus staff), are met, work, interact, communicate, educate, and are being educated within such an environment. This implies the presence of a ubiquitous wireless personal networking environment having nomadic characteristics. Several interesting scenarios and use cases are analyzed, along with a number of proposed candidate mobile technology solutions per usage case.The article is organized as follows: first, a general description of the academic case is presented identifying examples of typical communication activities within an academic environment; the technical requirements necessary for a successful deployment of personal area network (PAN)/PN technologies within the academic environment are also listed. Next, specific deployment scenarios are presented, followed by a business analysis. The article closes with a concluding section.
Content Personalization for Mobile Interfaces
Authors: Koukia S. , Rigou M.
Published: May 2011

The contribution of context information to content management is of great importance. The increase of storage capacity in mobile devices gives users the possibility to maintain large amounts of content to their phones. As a result, this amount of content is increasing at a high rate. Users are able to store a huge variety of content such as contacts, text messages, ring tones, logos, calendar events, and textual notes. Furthermore, the development of novel applications has created new types of content, which include images, videos, MMS (multi-media messaging), e-mail, music, play lists, audio clips, bookmarks, news and weather, chat, niche information services, travel and entertainment information, driving instructions, banking, and shopping (Schilit & Theimer, 1994; Schilit, Adams, & Want, 1994; Brown, 1996; Brown, Bovey, & Chen, 1997).
Context-Aware Systems
Authors: Chin Wong C.
Published: May 2011

This article examines market aspects, user requirements, and usage scenarios to come up with a roadmap and suggestions on how to deal with this matter.
Design Methodology for Mobile Information Systems
Authors: Maamar Z. , Mahmoud Q.
Published: May 2011

In this article, we report on the rationale of having a method for designing and developing mobile information systems. This method includes a conceptual model, a set of requirements, and different steps for developing the system. The development of a method for MISs is an appropriate response to the need of professionals in the field of MISs.