bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Definitions, Key Characteristics, and Generations of Mobile Games
Authors: Jeong Eui Jun , Kim Dan J.
Published: May 2011

In the emerging wireless environment of digital media communications represented as ubiquitous and convergence, rapid distribution of handheld mobile devices has brought the explosive growth of the mobile content market. Along with the development of the mobile content industry, mobile games supported by mobile features such as portability (mobility), accessibility (generality), and convenience (simplicity) have shown the highest growth rate in the world game market these days. In-Stat/MDR (2004) and Ovum (2004) expect that the mobile games’ annual growth rate between 2005 and 2009 will be around 50% in the United States and 30% in the world. According to KGDI (2005) and CESA (2005), compared to the rate of the whole game market (5%) of the world, it is about six times higher, and it exceeds the rate of video console (10%) and online games (25%). Mobile games thus are predicted to be one of the leading platforms in the world game market in 10 years’ time. In addition, as the competition among game companies has been enhanced with the convergence of game platforms, mobile games are being regarded as a breakthrough for the presently stagnant game market, which has focused on heavy users. However, due to the relative novelty of mobile games, there are a few visible barriers in the mobile game industry. First, definitions and terminologies and key characteristics related to mobile games are not clearly arranged as yet. Second, there is little research on the classification and development trends of mobile games. Therefore, this article is designed to contribute insights into these barriers in three ways. Firstly, the article provides narrow and broad definitions of mobile games. Secondly, key characteristics, platforms, and service types of mobile games are discussed. Finally, following the broad definition of mobile games, this article classifies mobile games as one to fourth generations and one pre-generation. Characteristics and examples of each generation are also presented.
Mobile Agents
Authors: Karoui Kamel
Published: May 2011

The concept of mobile agent is not new; it comes from the idea of OS process migration firstly presented by Xerox in the 1980’s. The term mobile agent was introduced by White & Miller (1994), which supported the mobility as a new feature in their programming language called Telescript. This new research topic has emerged from a successful meeting of several sub-sciences: computer networks, software engineering, object- oriented programming, artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, distributed and concurrent systems, mobile systems, telematics, computer-supported cooperative work, control systems, mining, decision support, information retrieval and management, and electronic commerce. It is also the fruit of exceptional advances in distributed systems field (Hirano 1997; Holder, Ben-Shaul, & Gazit 1999; Lange et al., 1999). The main idea of the mobile agent technology is to replace the old approach of the client-server Remote Procedure Call (RPC) paradigm, by a new one consisting of transporting and executing programs around a network. The results of the programs execution are then returned back to the sending entity. Figure 1 illustrates this new approach. Mobile agents are dynamic, non-deterministic, unpredictable, proactive, and autonomous entities. They can decide to exercise some degree of activities without being invoked by external entities. They can watch out for their own set of internal responsibilities. Agents can interact with their environment and other entities. They can support method invocation as well as more complex degree of interaction as for example the observable events reaction within their environment. They can decide to move from one server to another in order to accomplish the system global behavior.
A Neural Network-Based Mobile Architecture for Mobile Agents
Authors: Kuppuswami Anand
Published: May 2011

Wide area network (WAN) offers advantages like providing myriad services available on globally diversified computers with reasonably simple process. The ability to dynamically create networks offers the processing powers of various processors at our command. With the advent of protocols like SOAP and Web services, the consumption of services are more organized. In spite of various advances in communication techniques, the consumption of services through mobile gadgets is still only at the research level. The major impedances in implementing such systems on a mobile network are the latency factor, abrupt disconnection in service, lower bandwidth and minimal processing power. The mobile agent’s paradigm proves to be an effective solution to various issues raised. It has received serious attention in the last decade and several systems based on this paradigm have been proposed and built. All such systems have been designed for a static network, where the service providers and the requestors are connected to the server on a permanent basis. This chapter presents a new framework of managing the mobile environment and the participating nodes with active intelligent migration. The functioning of the mobile agents in such a scenario is also presented.
Location Area Design Algorithms for Minimizing Signalling Costs in Mobile Networks
Authors: Simon Vilmos , Imre Sándor
Published: May 2011

In the next generation, IP-based mobile networks, one of the most important QoS parameters, are the delay and the delay variation. The cell handover causes incremental signalling traffic, which can be critical from the point of view of delay variation. It worsens the quality parameters of the real-time services, which are the backbone of next generation mobile commercial services. We have designed and implemented two algorithms: a location area forming algorithm (LAFA) and a cell regrouping algorithm (CEREAL), which can help us to guarantee QoS parameters in the next generation mobile networks. We used our realistic mobile environment simulator to generate input statistics on cell changes and incoming calls for our algorithms and by comparing the values of the cost functions proposed by us, we recognized that significant reduction was achieved in the amount of the signalling traffic; the location update cost was decreased by 40-60% in average.
Knowledge Representation in Semantic Mobile Applications
Authors: Kamthan Panjak
Published: May 2011

Mobile applications today face the challenges of increasing information, diversity of users and user contexts, and ever-increasing variations in mobile computing platforms. They need to continue being a successful business model for service providers and useful to their user community in the light of these challenges. An appropriate representation of information is crucial for the agility, sustainability, and maintainability of the information architecture of mobile applications. This article discusses the potential of the Semantic Web (Hendler, Lassila, & Berners- Lee, 2001) framework to that regard. The organization of the article is as follows. We first outline the background necessary for the discussion that follows and state our position. This is followed by the introduction of a knowledge representation framework for integrating Semantic Web and mobile applications, and we deal with both social prospects and technical concerns. Next, challenges and directions for future research are outlined. Finally, concluding remarks are given.
Concepts and Operations of Two Research Projects on Web Services and Mobile Web Services
Authors: Maamar Zakaria
Published: May 2011

Today, Internet technologies are enabling a wave of innovations that have an important impact on the way businesses deal with their partners and customers. Most businesses are moving their operations to the Web for more automation, efficient business processes, and global visibility. Web services are one of the promising technologies that help businesses in achieving these operations and being more Web-oriented. Besides the new role of the Internet as a vehicle of delivering Web services, a major growth in the field of wireless and mobile technologies is witnessed. Because users are heavily relying on mobile devices to conduct their operations, enacting Web services from mobile devices and possibly downloading these Web services for execution on mobile devices are avenues that academia and industry communities are pursuing. M-services denote the Web services in the wireless world. In this chapter, two research initiatives carried out at Zayed University are presented and referred to as SAMOS, standing for Software Agents for MObile Services, and SASC, standing for Software Agents for Service Composition.
Tools for Rapidly Prototyping Mobile Interactions
Authors: Li Yang , Klemmer Scott , Landay James A.
Published: May 2011

We introduce informal prototyping tools as an important way to speed up the early-stage design of mobile interactions, by lowering the barrier to entry for designers and by reducing the cost of testing. We use two tools, SUEDE and Topiary, as proofs of concept for informal prototyping tools of mobile interactions. These tools address the early stage design of two important forms of mobile interactions: speech-based and locationenhanced interactions. In particular, we highlight storyboarding and Wizard of Oz (WOz) testing, two commonly used techniques, and discuss how they can be applied to address different domains. We also illustrate using a case study: the iterative design of a location-enhanced application called Place Finder using Topiary. In this chapter we hope to give the reader a sense of what should be considered as well as possible solutions for informal prototyping tools for mobile interactions.
Convergence Technology for Enabling Technologies
Authors: Sivaradje G. , Saravanan I. , Dananjayan P.
Published: May 2011

Today, we find a large number of wireless networks based on different radio access technologies (RATs). Every existing RAT has its own merits. Now the focus is turned towards the next-generation communication networks (Akyildiz, Mohanty, & Xie, 2005), which will seamlessly integrate various existing wireless communication networks, such as wireless local area networks (WLANs, e.g., IEEE 802.11 a/b/g and HIPERLAN/2), wireless wide area networks (WWANs, e.g., 1G, 2G, 3G, IEEE 802.20), wireless personal area networks (WPANs, e.g., Bluetooth, IEEE 802.15.1/3/4), and wireless metropolitan area networks (WMANs, e.g., IEEE 802.16) to form a converged heterogeneous architecture (Cavalcanti, Agrawal, Cordeiro, Xie, & Kumar, 2005). Seamless integration does not mean that the RATs are converged into a single network. Instead the services offered by the existing RATs are integrated as shown in Figure 1. Convergence technology is a technology that combines different existing access technologies such as cellular, cordless, WLAN-type systems, short-range wireless connectivity, and wired systems on a common platform to complement each other in an optimum way and to provide a multiplicity of possibilities for current and future services and applications to users in a single terminal. After creating a converged heterogeneous architecture, the next step is to perform a common radio resource management (RRM) (Magnusson, Lundsjo, Sachs, & Wallentin, 2004). RRM helps to maximize the use of available spectrum resources, support mixed traffic types with different QoS requirements, increase trunking capacity and grade of service (GoS), improve spectrum usage by selecting the best RAT based on radio conditions (e.g., path loss), minimize inter-system handover latency, preserve QoS across multiple RATs, and reduce signaling delay.
Mobile Virtual Communities of Commuters
Authors: Kawash Jalal , El Morr Christo , Taha Hamza , Charaf Wissam
Published: May 2011

Commuting forms an integral part of our lives, whether we are commuting for leisure or business. The use of location-based services and mobile computing has potentials to improve commuting experience and awareness. For instance, printed bus schedules have been only recently complemented with online systems to provide bus timing information for the community of public transport commuters. Commuters can nowadays inquire about bus timings by the use of telephony systems and the Internet. However, the information provided to users is statically produced, just like the still in-use old fashion bus route tables, and does not take into consideration delays and cancellations. The next step in the evolution of these schedules must produce live information, track bus movements, and alert commuters of bus arrivals and timings. The experience of commuting using taxis can also be improved beyond the use of telephony, while the most common way of asking for a taxi continues to be by hand waiving. Such improvements are more crucial for commuters that are not completely aware of their surrounding environment, such as tourists and business visitors. This article envisions the formation of networked organizations of commuters, through the use of mobile and location-based services. We discuss scenarios and use cases of such organizations and propose an example software implementation for the supporting services.
Consumer Perceptions and Attitudes Towards Mobile Marketing
Authors: Carroll Amy , Barnes Stuart J. , Scornavacca Eusebio
Published: May 2011

Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand; University of East Anglia, UK; Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
User Acceptance of Mobile Services
Authors: Kaasinen Eija
Published: May 2011

Personal mobile devices are increasingly being used as platforms for interactive services. User acceptance of mobile services is not just based on usability but includes also other interrelated issues. Ease of use is important, but the services should also provide clear value to the user and they should be trustworthy and easy to adopt. These user acceptance factors form the core of the Technology Acceptance Model for Mobile Services introduced in this chapter. The model has been set up based on field trials of several mobile services with altogether more than 200 test users. The model can be used as a design and evaluation framework when designing new mobile services.
Mobile Phone Communication Innovation in Multiple Time and Space Zones
Authors: Chan Shirley , Vogel Douglas , Ma Louis C.K.
Published: May 2011

In most parts of the world, it is generally considered impolite or even rude to pick up an incoming mobile phone call and to have a longer (and loud) conversation in public places. Yet this type of interruption is generally acceptable in Hong Kong. This inspired the authors to ask: How does Hong Kong culture impact the perception of mobile phone interruption? This research note is about an ethnographical study on the culture in Hong Kong indicating a more positive perception towards mobile phone interruption. Their research results show that the cultural characteristics of fast pace, deal-making and sense of urgency explain why Hong Kong people are receptive towards such interruption and have the habit of participating in both the physical and mobile spaces at the same time. Their findings also challenge the engagingdisengaging paradox theory - that is, mobile phone users find it difficult to simultaneously engage in parallel activities.
Influence of Mobile Technologies on Global Business Processes in Global Organizations
Authors: Arunatileka Dinesh , Ghanbary Abbass , Unhelkar Bhuvan
Published: May 2011

Organizations are globalizing their business primarily due to the communications capabilities offered by Internet technologies. As a result, there are global business processes that span across multiple geographical locations and time zones. The influence of mobility on these global business processes does not appear to have been studied in sufficient detail. Furthermore, mobile technology goes far beyond its ubiquitous use as a mobile phone for voice communication or for the exchange of messages. This chapter discusses and recommends a model for transition and integration of mobility into global business processes. We also envisage the accommodation of mobile Web services in mobile transformations enabling business applications to collaborate regardless of their technological platforms.
Strategies of Mobile Value-Added Services in Korea
Authors: Kim Jin Ki , Chun Heasun
Published: May 2011

As the growth of the mobile market decreases and the market competition intensifies, mobile carriers have been trying to find new business models to retain their profits and expand their business boundaries. Development of value-added services increases the chances of keeping the growth with mobile carriers. This chapter discusses the motivation of mobile value-added service in terms of value chain and mobile adoption. Six mobile value-added services presented in Korea are introduced: (1) short messaging service (SMS), (2) personalized call-ring service, (3) mobile music service, (4) mobile video service, (5) mobile payment (m-payment), and (6) mobile games. The major characteristics of those value-added services are discussed with “4Cs”: (1) customization, (2) content-focused, (3) connectedness, and (4) contemporary. This chapter also discusses digital multimedia broadcasting (DMB) as a new value-added service and the impacts of valueadded services on the mobile market. This chapter is concluded with three plausible strategies of mobile carriers: (1) real-time, market-responding strategy, (2) content-focused market strategy, and (3) various bundling service.
Semantic Location Modeling for Mobile Enterprises
Authors: Yuan Soe-Tsyr , Hsieh Pei-Hung
Published: May 2011

A location model represents the inclusive objects and their relationships in a space and helps engender the values of location based services (LBS). Nevertheless, LBS for enterprise decision support are rare due to the common use of static location models. This chapter presents for enterprises a framework of dynamic semantic location modeling that is novel in three ways: (1) It profoundly brings location models into enterprise business models; (2) with a novel method of dynamic semantic location modeling, enterprises effectively recognize the needs of the clients and the partners scattered in different locations, advancing existing business relationships by exerting appropriate service strategies through their mobile workforces; (3) through the location model platform of information sharing, enterprises are empowered to discover potential business partners and predict the values of their cooperation, gaining competitive advantages when appropriate partnership deals are made by enterprise mobile workforces. This proposed framework has been implemented with the J2EE technology and attained the positive evidences of its claimed values.
Semantic Web Services and Mobile Agents Integration for Efficient Mobile Services
Authors: Baousis Vasileios , Spiliopoulos Vassilis , Zavitsanos Elias
Published: May 2011

The requirement for ubiquitous service access in wireless environments presents a great challenge in light of well-known problems like high error rate and frequent disconnections. In order to satisfy this requirement, we propose the integration of two modern service technologies: Web Services and Mobile Agents. This integration allows wireless users to access and invoke semantically enriched Web Services without the need for simultaneous, online presence of the service requestor. Moreover, in order to improve the capabilities of Service registries, we exploit the advantages offered by the Semantic Web framework. Specifically, we use enhanced registries enriched with semantic information that provide semantic matching to service queries and published service descriptions. Finally, we discuss the implementation of the proposed framework and present our performance assessment findings.
High Performance Scheduling Mechanism for Mobile Computing Based on Self-Ranking Algorithm
Authors: Ali Hesham A. , Farrag Tamer Ahmed
Published: May 2011

Due to the rapidly increasing number of mobile devices connected to the Internet, a lot of research is being conducted to maximize the benefit of such integration. The main objective of this article is to enhance the performance of the scheduling mechanism of the mobile computing environment by distributing some of the responsibilities of the access point among the available attached mobile devices. To this aim, we investigate a scheduling mechanism framework that comprises an algorithm that provides the mobile device with the authority to evaluate itself as a resource. The proposed mechanism is based on the “self ranking algorithm” (SRA), which provides a lifetime opportunity to reach a proper solution. This mechanism depends on an event-based programming approach to start its execution in a pervasive computing environment. Using such a mechanism will simplify the scheduling process by grouping mobile devices according to their self-ranking value and assigning tasks to these groups. Moreover, it will maximize the benefit of the mobile devices incorporated with the already existing Grid systems by using their computational power as a subordinate value to the overall power of the system. Furthermore, we evaluate the performance of the investigated algorithm extensively, to show how it overcomes the connection stability problem of the mobile devices. Experimental results emphasized that the proposed SRA has a great impact in reducing the total error and link utilization compared with the traditional mechanism.
Bridging Together Mobile and Service-Oriented Computing
Authors: Oliveira Loreno , Loureiro Emerson , Almeida Hyggo , Perkusich Angelo
Published: May 2011

The growing popularity of powerful mobile devices, such as modern cellular phones, smart phones, and PDAs, is enabling pervasive computing (Weiser, 1991) as the new paradigm for creating and interacting with computational systems. Pervasive computing is characterized by the interaction of mobile devices with embedded devices dispersed across smart spaces, and with other mobile devices on behalf of users. The interaction between user devices and smart spaces occurs primarily through services advertised on those environments. For instance, airports may offer a notification service, where the system registers the user flight at the checkin and keeps the user informed, for example, by means of messages, about flight schedule or any other relevant information. In the context of smart spaces, service-oriented computing (Papazoglou & Georgakopoulos, 2003), in short SOC, stands out as the effective choice for advertising services to mobile devices (Zhu, Mutka, & Ni, 2005; Bellur & Narendra, 2005). SOC is a computing paradigm that has in services the essential elements for building applications. SOC is designed and deployed through service-oriented architectures (SOAs) and their applications. SOAs address the flexibility for dynamic binding of services, which applications need to locate and execute a given operation in a pervasive computing environment. This feature is especially important due to the dynamics of smart spaces, where resources may exist anywhere and applications running on mobile clients must be able to find out and use them at runtime. In this article, we discuss several issues on bridging mobile devices and service-oriented computing in the context of smart spaces. Since smart spaces make extensive use of services for interacting with personal mobile devices, they become the ideal scenario for discussing the issues for this integration. A brief introduction on SOC and SOA is also presented, as well as the main architectural approaches for creating SOC environments aimed at the use of resource-constrained mobile devices.
A Proposed Tool for Mobile Collaborative Reading
Authors: Black Jason T. , Hawkes Lois Wright
Published: May 2011

This chapter presents a tool for collaborative elearning using handheld devices that incorporates pair communication via text and speech input. It discusses the current state of e-learning for mobiles and illustrates the lack of such tools in reading comprehension domains. It then describes the tool development as a model for interface design; communication strategies; and data manipulation across mobile platforms. It is argued that such a tool can enhance e-learning among children; due to freedom of movement and variety of input (text and speech). The design is centered on a proven paper-based collaborative learning methodology which should strengthen its effectiveness. A paper prototype test that assisted in determining optimum interface layout and confirming that speech input was preferred among children is described. The system was developed and designed using creative strategies for interface layout and data manipulation. Lessons learned and plans for additional research are discussed.
SMEs ECT Reality
Authors: Elsammani Zakia A.
Published: May 2011

Lack of strategic planning in e-commerce and subsequently e-business adoption within smallto medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) has been strongly reported in literature. This chapter presents SMEs’ Web presence implementation patterns and unravels the reasons behind the lack of strategic planning when adopting Electronic Commerce Technologies (ECT). The chapter presents findings from semi-structured interviews from 11 SMEs in the Northwest of the UK. Findings reflect the difference in development and management practices of Web presence, between the more able Need Pull SMEs that identified the need to adopt ECT, and the less able Technology Push SMEs that were mostly influenced by change agent diffusion and awareness efforts. Over time, each group of SMEs reflect a different pattern in ECT implementation. This chapter depicts the issues that hinder SMEs, particularly in micro and small, in moving beyond Web site adoption.
Balancing Accuracy of Promised Ship Data and IT Costs
Authors: Lee Young M.
Published: May 2011

In an ideal e-business environment, when a customer order is scheduled and a ship date is computed, the availability should immediately be reserved and not be available for future orders. However, in reality the availability data that are used for the scheduling the orders are not real time availability (physical availability), but they are availability information stored in an IT system (system availability). The availability data in the IT system (static view of availability) is typically refreshed (synchronized with real time availability) only periodically since it is very expensive to update the database in real time. Due to this potentially inaccurate view of the availability, some orders cannot be shipped on the promised ship date. Therefore, for certain customer orders, products are shipped later than the promised ship date resulting in customer dissatisfaction. Therefore, one of key decisions in order fulfillment process is to properly balance IT system (e.g., IT expense) and accuracy of promised ship date. In this work, we study how availability fresh rate (IT system) impacts customer service level. The simulation model we develop helps making critical business decision on refresh rate of availability, and avoiding expensive IT investment.
Web-Enabled Portals for E-Business Workplace
Authors: Wojtkowski Wita
Published: May 2011

Portals are information systems that support the user in his or her individual process with information production and communication. The term portal, in information technology terms, appeared in late 1990s at a time of the widespread use of the Internet by individuals and organizations (Finkelstein & Aiken, 1999; Dias, 2001; Bristow, Dickinson, Duke, Henry, & Makey, 2001; Collins, 2001, 2003). There are many types of portals on the Internet: portals for general consumer use and entertainment (my.yahoo.com), for specialized information (www.brint.com), for specific communities (Austrian Academic Portal at www.portal.ac.at/), for business enterprises (NEC global portal at www.nec.com, NEC US portal at www.necus. com/, NEC European portal at www.neceurope. com). In general, portals can be divided into two categories: public and enterprise (Goodman & Kleinschmidt, 2003; Forrester, 2003). Public portals started as Internet directories (Yahoo!) or search engines (Excite, Lycos, Alta- Vista, and InfoSeek). Services that require user registration such as free e-mail, customization features, and chat rooms were added to allow repeated use, and to make users stay longer at the site. Enterprise portals started as intranets and extranets, the “enterprise webs” that were intended to provide easy-to-use, secure, and personalized sites that may extend to an organization’s employees as well as to its customers and business partners. Enterprise portals evolved to include collaboration tools so that customers, business partners, and employees are empowered to maximize their value to the organization. Portals that combine Web communications and thinking inside large enterprises are considered as both a labor-saving and a cost-saving technology. Enterprise portals are also referred to as corporate portals. Some corporate analysts predict that portals spending will be one of the top five areas for growth in the Internet technologies sector.
Application Integration
Authors: Lee So-Jung , Lam Wing
Published: May 2011

This case describes a pilot project to implement a financial portfolio system (FPS) within Jwon Bank. (The case is based on a real-life organisation, although the identity of the organisation has been disguised at the organisation’s request.) A strategic IT review of Jwon Bank’s IT systems and architecture revealed that a lack of integration between IT systems was hampering the bank’s capability to meet its business vision. A key recommendation from the review was the development of an FPS that would enable customers to manage all their financial assets and access financial services from a single place. However, creating an FPS meant that Jwon Bank had to develop a strategic solution to meet the integration needs across the entire bank. Jwon Bank examined enterprise application integration (EAI) tools, and embarked on a pilot project to develop a prototype FPS and test the robustness of an EAI solution. The case highlights some of the management issues relating to integration projects of this nature, including strategic planning for integration, EAI tool selection and evaluation, and understanding of business process flow across divisional silos.
Evaluating E-Business Leadership and Its Links to Firm Performance
Authors: Quan Jing
Published: May 2011

The rapid expansion of e-business witnessed in the late 1990s was nothing short of a spectacle. It seemed that almost everyone was talking about it, and every firm was eager to invest in it, hoping to take away a slice of the pie. Andy Grove, chairman of Intel Corp, stated in 1998: “Within 5 years, all companies will be Internet companies or they would not be companies” (Intel, 2000). Merely mentioning of the “e” word could mean multi-million dollars. The case at hand was Zapata Corp., a fish oil processing company, co-founded by former U.S. President George H. W. Bush. The company announced on December 23, 1998 that it would transform itself into an Internet portal to compete with Yahoo!, Lycos, and alike. Immediately following the announcement, Zapata’s stock price skyrocketed nearly 100% from 7.19 to 14.25 with trading volume at more than 2,000% higher than normal, according to Yahoo! Finance. Academic researchers rushed in and concluded that “a new economy was born.” The potential benefits of e-business are well documented by academic researchers and practitioners alike (InternetWeek, 2000/2001; Phan, 2003). Organizations that integrate e-business applications, such as shared online database and Internet-based reporting in their business processes, can lead to reduced cost, increased efficiency and profitability, and better customer relationship management. Perhaps one of the most significant contributions of e-business applications is its abilities to directly bring sellers and buyers together with little middleman’s interventions. Although the advantages of e-business exist in theory, little empirical work has been done to confirm them.
Exploring Relationship between Information Systems Strategic Orientation and Small Business Performance
Authors: Rajendran R. , Vivekanandan K.
Published: May 2011

Businesses invest in developing information systems resources to gain competitive advantages. Literature has demonstrated the requirement of strategic alignment in converting these competitive advantages into sustained superior business performance. The knowledge of information systems strategic orientation and its relationship with business performance will enable these businesses to fine tune their strategic information systems applications portfolio in achieving required strategic alignment. This study focuses on the information systems strategic orientation of small businesses and investigates its relationship with their perceived business performance. The organizational impact of adoption of the initial stages of electronic business development is also examined. The data were collected from small businesses on nine strategy areas, through mail survey. The result reveals three multifaceted dimensions of information systems strategic orientation. These dimensions of strategic orientation have significantly influenced their business performance. For the adopters of Web presence, all these three dimensions remain significant in explaining their business performance.
Secure Authentication Process for High Sensitive Data E-Services
Authors: Ardagna Claudio Agostino , Damiani Ernesto , Frati Fulvio , Reale Salvatore
Published: May 2011

The widespread diffusion of online services provided by public and private organizations, firstly driven by e-commerce and more recently by egovernment applications, has stressed the need of secure ways to authenticate users who need to access online resources. The huge number of resources accessible on the Web leads to different authentication mechanisms implementations that often require multiple log-on actions also in intradomain multiservices scenario. In case of high sensitive services, users’ authentication plays a role of paramount importance. In this article is presented a case study that gives a roadmap of authentication mechanisms implemented at different levels of services’ software structure. The discussion starts by illustrating different authentication solutions implemented at operating system, application server or components level to conclude with Single Sign-On approach. For each solution, pros and cons are discussed. The SSO system, called CAS++, developed as an extension to Yale University’s CAS, is then presented.
E-Business Standardization in the Automotive Sector
Authors: Gerst Martina , Jakobs Kai
Published: May 2011

Successful cooperation between large manufacturers and their suppliers is a crucial aspect, especially in the automotive industry. Such mutually beneficial cooperation requires at least a certain level of integration and interoperation of the partners’ IT and e-business systems. This chapter looks at two approaches in order to achieve this goal: sector-specific harmonization (in the form of electronic marketplaces) and international, committee-based standardization. This chapter shows that SMEs are facing a severe disadvantage in both cases. This is, however, less pronounced in a formal standards setting, in which capabilities of the individual representatives are more important, at least at the working level.
An Overview of Fuzzy Approaches to Flexible Database Querying
Authors: Zadrozny Slawomir , de Tré Guy , de Caluwe Rita , Kacprzyk Janusz
Published: May 2011

In reality, a lot of information is available only in an imperfect form. This might be due to imprecision, vagueness, uncertainty, incompleteness, or ambiguities. Traditional database systems can only adequately cope with perfect data. Among others, fuzzy set theory has been applied to deal with imperfections of data in a more natural way and to enhance the accessibility of databases. In this chapter, we give an overview of main trends in the research on flexible querying techniques that are based on fuzzy set theory. Both querying techniques for traditional databases as well as querying techniques for fuzzy databases are described. The discussion comprises both the relational and the object-oriented database modeling approaches.
Distributed Data Mining
Authors: Tsoumakas Grigorios , Vlahavas Ioannis
Published: May 2011

The continuous developments in information and communication technology have recently led to the appearance of distributed computing environments, which comprise several, and different sources of large volumes of data and several computing units. The most prominent example of a distributed environment is the Internet, where increasingly more databases and data streams appear that deal with several areas, such as meteorology, oceanography, economy and others. In addition the Internet constitutes the communication medium for geographicallydistributed information systems, as for example the earth observing system of NASA (eos.gsfc.nasa.gov). Other examples of distributed environments that have been developed in the last few years are sensor networks for process monitoring and grids where a large number of computing and storage units are interconnected over a highspeed network.
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.
Multi-Label Classification
Authors: Tsoumakas Grigorios , Katakis Ioannis
Published: May 2011

Multi-label classification methods are increasingly required by modern applications, such as protein function classification, music categorization, and semantic scene classification. This article introduces the task of multi-label classification, organizes the sparse related literature into a structured presentation and performs comparative experimental results of certain multi-label classification methods. It also contributes the definition of concepts for the quantification of the multi-label nature of a data set.
Efficient and Robust Node-Partitioned Data Warehouses
Authors: Furtado Pedro
Published: May 2011

Running large data warehouses (DWs) efficiently over low cost platforms places special requirements on the design of system architecture. The idea is to have the DW on a set of low-cost nodes in a nondedicated local area network (LAN). Nodes can run any relational database engine, and the system relies on a partitioning strategy and query processing middle layer. These characteristics are in contrast with typical parallel database systems, which rely on fast dedicated interconnects and hardware, as well as a specialized parallel query optimizer for a specific database engine. This chapter describes the architecture of the nodepartitioned data warehouse (NPDW), designed to run on the low cost environment, focusing on the design for partitioning, efficient parallel join and query transformations. Given the low reliability of the target environment, we also show how replicas are incorporated in the design of a robust NPDW strategy with availability guarantees and how the replicas are used for always-on, always efficient behavior in the presence of periodic load and maintenance tasks.
A Taxonomy of Database Operations on Mobile Devices
Authors: Lim Say Ying , Tainar David , Srinivasan Bala
Published: May 2011

In this chapter, we present an extensive study of database operations on mobile devices which provides an understanding and direction for processing data locally on mobile devices. Generally, it is not efficient to download everything from the remote databases and display on a small screen. Also in a mobile environment, where users move when issuing queries to the servers, location has become a crucial aspect. Our taxonomy of database operations on mobile devices mainly consists of on-mobile join operations and onmobile location dependent operations. For the on-mobile join operation, we include pre- and post-processing whereas for on-mobile location dependent operations, we focus on set operations arise from location-dependent queries.
Implementation of a Computerized System in an Oncology Unit
Authors: Botsis Taxiarchis , Syrigos Konstantinos
Published: May 2011

Information management is essential for health professionals in order to maintain a level of productivity for health care services management. This is significant when treating cancer patients. The main target of this study was to employ computers to enhance the daily practice of Oncology Unit (Sotiria Hospital, Athens, Greece). Accordingly, a computerized system was developed consisting of three modules: the EPR, the Image Archive, and the Lab Module. The EPR Module is a database application that stores clinical results, physician orders, and several administrative data. The Image Archive Module is used mainly for the reduction of images volume and the Lab Module stores information about the patient blood samples. These two modules interoperate through EPR Module under strict data security policies. Key physicians, biologists, and secretary personnel are involved in data entry and information management, while the system administrator is responsible for the system functioning. Improved health care, user satisfaction, and cost savings were the most important benefits gained with this system. The need of similar systems in oncology is crucial and could involve additional applications, such as quality of life (QoL) systems.
Fine-Grained Data Security in Virtual Organizations
Authors: Indraratne Harith , Hosszú Gábor
Published: May 2011

Controlling the access to data based on user credentials is a fundamental part of database management systems. In most cases, the level at which information is controlled extends only to a certain level of granularity. In some scenarios, however, there is a requirement to control access at a more granular way allowing the users to see only the data they are supposed to see in a database table. Fine-grained access control (FGAC) provides row-level security capabilities to secure information stored in modern relational database management systems. In case of creating the virtual networking infrastructure of virtual organizations, the security of the data stored in database management systems is a very important issue. Several models have been proposed by research community and database vendors for specifying and enforcing row-level access control at the database layer. This article reviews the most important facts of some significant FGAC models and current implementations of such in two commercial database management systems. We describe a novel concept of implementing FGAC in SQL Server 2005, which resembles Oracle 10g database management system’s FGAC solution virtual private databases (VPD).
Metaphors and Models for Data Mining Ethics
Authors: Danielson Peter
Published: May 2011

Our regulatory institutions, broadly taken, include our moral norms and models and have not fully adapted to significant changes in data mining technology. For example, we suggest that the metaphors — Big Brother and “data mining” itself — commonly used to describe and assess this new technology are deficient, overemphasizing social discipline by the state and the passivity of the so-called data subject. We move from metaphors to a set of models more adequate for building an ethics of data mining, using a framework of informal game theory. We sketch three models of interaction: pure conflict, pure coordination, and a mixed motive cooperation game, with special application to security, health, and commerce, respectively. We recommend these three models as heuristics within a simple account of an ethics of data mining regulated by informed consent.
Context-Aware Query Processing in Ad-Hoc Environments of Peers
Authors: Folinas Nikolaos , Vassiliadis Panos , Pitoura Evaggelia , Papapetrou Evangelos , Zarras Apostolos
Published: May 2011

In this article, we deal with context-aware query processing in ad-hoc peer-to-peer networks. Each peer in such an environment has a database over which users execute queries. This database involves (a) relations which are locally stored and (b) virtual relations, all the tuples of which are collected from peers that are present in the network at the time when a query is posed. The objective of our work is to perform query processing in such an environment and, to this end, we start with a formal definition of the system model. Next, we formally define SQLP, an extension of SQL that covers the termination of queries, the failure of individual peers and the semantic characteristics of the peers of such a network. Moreover, we present a query execution algorithm as well as the formal definition of all the operators that take place in a query execution plan.
Business Information Integration from XML and Relational Databases Sources
Authors: Fermoso Garcia Ana María , Gallinas Roberto Berjón
Published: May 2011

This chapter introduces different alternatives to store and manage jointly relational and eXtensible Markup Language (XML) data sources. Nowadays, businesses are transformed in e-business and have to manage large data volumes and from heterogeneous sources. To manage large amounts of information, Database Management Systems (DBMS) continue to be one of the most used tools, and the most extended model is the relational one. On the other side, XML has reached the de facto standard to present and exchange information between businesses on the Web. Therefore, it could be necessary to use tools as mediators to integrate these two different data to a common format like XML, since it is the main data format on the Web. First, a classification of the main tools and systems where this problem is handled is made, with their advantages and disadvantages. The objective will be to propose a new system to solve the integration business information problem.
Database Security and Statistical Database Security
Authors: Weippl Edgar R.
Published: May 2011

In this article we will present an introduction to issues relevant to database security and statistical database security. We will briefly cover various security models, elaborate on how data analysis in data warehouses (DWH) might compromise an individual’s privacy, and explain which safeguards can be used to prevent attacks. In most companies, databases are an essential part of IT infrastructure since they store critical business data. In the last two decades, databases have been used to process increasing amounts of transactional data, such as, a complete account of a person’s purchases from a retailer or connection data from calls made on a cell phone. As soon as this data became available from transactional databases and online transactional processing (OLTP) became well established, the next logical step was to use the knowledge contained in the vast amounts of data. Today, data warehouses (DWH) store aggregated data in an optimal way to serve queries related to business analysis.