Foreword of Special Issue on "E-Service and Applications"
Authors: J. C. Hung; Hsing-I Wang
Year: 2011

This special issue aims to bring together researchers and practitioners to engage in an in-depth discussion on various research and deployment issues regarding e-commerce and e-government. Finally, it creates the new value to information industries. Research in these fields is emergent and crucial, not only in academic and research community, but also in industrial field. In this decade, technological application researches are very popular. This special issue focuses on the state-of-the-art software technology related to these issues, including Resource management for cloud systems,  Services integration and management in cloud systems,  Optimal deployment configuration, Web services,  Vision on novel advances of automated intelligent business agents and e-Commerce, Modeling and simulation of business processes, e-Supply Chains, e-Logistics, e-Procurement for both businesses and government , e-Participation, e-Governance, and e-Voting. Ten papers are included in this special issue. In the first paper entitled “Measure the Performance of Reducing Digital Divide – the BSC and AHP Approach”, Dr. Hsing-I Wang and Chien-Chih Yu discussed to adopt the analytical hierarchy process to prioritize the performance indicators which have been determined in the digital divide balance scorecard. The architecture proposed by the research would be applied to examine the merits of the strategies. This research applies the AHP method to the DDBSC framework. In this paper, the weight of each criterion in the AHP tree is calculated and examples of demonstrating how the indicators are applied to the real cases to determine the performance of the strategies for reducing digital divides are given.  In order to increase the accessibility of the healthcare support e-service, the second paper entitled “A Study on Healthcare Support e-Service Design for Senior Citizens” by Prof. Yuan-Chu Hwang tried to utilize multimedia streaming technology and video clips to present stroke–precaution knowledge for elderly senior citizens. This paper presents an e-service design on stroke-precaution for senior citizens, followed by its implementation and evaluation. With the healthcare support e-service, life quality for elderly senior citizens and their families could be significantly improved. Belalem Ghalem, Bouamama Samah, and Larbi Sekhri proposed to extend and enrich the simulator CloudSim by auction algorithms inherited from GridSim simulator. In the third paper entitled “An effective economic management of resources in Cloud Computing”, authors have the following contributions. Proposing a method or approach that will satisfy both the customer and supplier resource. Find a solution for customers who want a high quality of treatment but who do not have enough budgets, by the possibility of credit. Propose an implementation of auction club using a multi-agent system. Allow multi-criteria negotiation and intelligent system for decision support auction.   “A Study of Travel Agencies’ Human Resources in Relation to Internet Marketing” written by Huang-Wei Su, Li-Tze Lee, Chiang Ku Fan, and Jason C. Hung proposed this study is to discover whether the travel agencies salespeople feel threatened by the development of Internet marketing. Also, this study seeks to reveal the specific personal thoughts of travel agency salespeople if they do feel threatened. This study provided suggestions for training programs or criteria of recruitment for the human resource directors in travel agencies.   In “KNN-DTW Based Missing Value Imputation for Microarray Time Series Data”, Prof. Hui-Huang Hsu, Andy C. Yang, Ming-Da Lu present a novel method to impute missing values in microarray time-series data combining k-nearest neighbor (KNN) and dynamic time warping (DTW). They also analyze and implement several variants of DTW to further improve the efficiency and accuracy of their method. Experimental results showed that their method is more accurate compared with existing missing value imputation methods on real microarray time series datasets. Prof. Benjamin Penyang Liao pointed out t this study analyses the human relationship starting from the constructing material for the connection line. In the sixth paper entitled “Insight of Value-oriented Human Relationship”, a human relationship influence spectrum with seven phases is discussed. This spectrum could provide a good insight of human relationships. Finally, the influence phase transition, influence scope, and characteristics of human relationship influence spectrum are discussed in this article. “Development of Semantic-CBR Framework for Virtual Enterprises in Project Management” written by Prof. Chouyin Hsu. Semantic-CBR framework is proposed for improving the communication and integrating the project experiences for virtual enterprises. OWL and RDF are applied for the implementation of the semantic structure of the framework. Moreover, case-based reasoning is utilized for selecting the related project experiences according to the user requirement. Semantic-CBR framework is proposed for improving the communication and integrating the project experiences for virtual enterprises. OWL and RDF are applied for the implementation of the semantic structure of the framework. Moreover, case-based reasoning is utilized for selecting the related project experiences according to the user requirement. In “A Diffusion of Innovations Approach to Investigate the RFID Adoption in Taiwan Logistics Industry”, Prof. Yu-Bing Wang, Kuan-Yu Lin, Lily Chang , and Jason C. Hung purpose this study investigating how RFID technology was implemented and adopted in Taiwan’s logistics industry. This study also aimed to determine the concern factors of adopting the RFID system into current company management systems.  RFID provider companies should try their best to promote this technology’s attributes of innovations: the relative advantages of RFID system to their potential customers, such as the costs reduction, profit capability and improvement of operation performance, design RFID system more friendly and more compatibility for quick adoption; reduce RFID system’s difficulty and make it easy to learn and use. RFID providers can provide a trial-able project toward their potential customers. In the ninth paper entitled “Incremental Mining of Across-streams Sequential Patterns in Multiple Data Streams”, Shih-Yang Yang, Ching-Ming Chao, Po-Zung Chen and Chu-Hao Sun propose the IAspam algorithm that not only can handle a set of items at a time but also can incrementally mine across-streams sequential patterns. In the process, stream data are converted into bitmap representation for mining. Experimental results show that the IAspam algorithm is effective in execution time when processing large amounts of stream data.  In the tenth paper, “The Effect of Online Training on Employee’s Performance” proposed by Prof. Shu Ching Yang and Chin Hung Lin is aiming at determining the effect of online distance-learning instruction on employees’ learning achievement those who took a training program of online distance-learning instruction and those who did not. Since many factors will affect employees’ learning achievement, this study also explored the effect of self-efficacy, gender, computer experience, and socioeconomic status, on the learning achievement of employees in a Taiwanese manufacturing company. Additionally, this study investigated students’ satisfaction with online distance-learning instruction. The major findings were that learning achievement was similar for online distance learning and traditional face-to-face instruction.