Interoperability in subject terminologies: The HILT Project

HILT was asked by The UK Higher Education's RSLP Programme and its JISC Service to conduct a desk study into the situation in the UK with regard to the use of different subject schemes and associated practices across the libraries, museums, archives, and electronic services communities in the context of the assumption that there is ‐ and will increasingly be ‐ a need for users and staff to cross‐search and browse services in these communities by subject. It found a strong consensus across the communities in favour of a more practically focused follow‐up pilot project. This would determine the full costs and benefits of a networked, user and machine responsive, interactive route map to the terminologies used by the communities and the relationships between these terminologies. The Final Report, produced at the end of 2001, recommended an approach based on these outcomes, whilst also attempting to take into account various reservations and additional remarks made by stakeholders.     

It-Enabled Healthcare Delivery: The U.K. National Health Service

Many national governments are investing in the electronic delivery of government services, including the use of Web services models. This article describes the United Kingdom's National Programme for Information Technology (NPfIT) initiative for the National Health Service (NHS), a $10 billion project to develop the infrastructure for a national electronic health record over a ten-year period. the case study discussion focuses on some of the challenges related to Web service delivery with multiple vendors in the context of a complex, public service organization.     

Technical Report Literature on the World Wide Web

Abstract

This article reviews and analyzes the current state of Web access to technical report literature. Besides locating sites for bibliographically identifying technical reports, it also looks at the ways the full-text of technical reports are being distributed. Where appropriate, it compares the electronic bibliographic control products with their print or formerly print equivalents. Most widely available at this point are federal government reports and computer science technical reports. Information on coping with the various file formats found at the sites is also provided. URLs to the various technical report sites and to sites dealing with the software applications needed to access the reports are included.     

A study of e‐mail patterns

Although electronic mail is an increasingly important service, there are few empirical studies of e‐mail traffic. We have observed over 2.85 million messages passing through our departmental servers over the course of seven months, and derived distributions that approximate several important e‐mail parameters including message sizes, message senders and receivers and the burstiness of message deliveries. Our work is unique in that we also analyse message payloads: attachment content types, e‐mail redundancy, and the use of e‐mail as a sharing mechanism. These data can be used in developing e‐mail workloads for mail system engineering or benchmarking. To this end, we provide an improved version of Postmark, a small‐file Internet benchmark, that better approximates mail server characteristics. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A methodology for expert systems development

There are virtually no methods or techniques available for developing expert systems in law. Further, with the exception of the UK government's Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency project, GEMINI, [1] there has been no attempt to lay the foundations for an expert systems development methodology in general. This paper discusses a number of conventional software engineering methodologies and explains why the spiral model is most suited to the development of legal expert systems. This also happens to be the same model which was advocated by the results of the GEMINI project.[2]     

Toward a Service-Oriented Development Through a Case Study

The rapidly emerging technology of Web services paves a new cost-effective way of engineering software to quickly develop and deploy Web applications by dynamically integrating other independently developed Web-service components to conduct new business transactions. This paper reports our efforts on designing and developing a Web service of pass-through authentication (PTA) for 12 online electronic-payment Web applications. In accordance with how a PTA service is developed and integrated with a corresponding back-end e-payment system, our strategies can be categorized in three stages: end-to-end integration stage, Web-services-enabled stage, and Web-services-oriented stage. Derived from real-world industrial experience, this three-stage pathway can be applied to a broad range of Web-application development projects to guide smooth transformation from a specific application-oriented design and development model toward a reusable Web-services-oriented model. Furthermore, this paper contributes to an engineering process that leads to practical Web-services-oriented software development. New research issues revealed by this project are also reported.     

B2B integration in global supply chains: An identification of technical integration scenarios

The competitiveness of businesses is increasingly dependent on their electronic networks with customers, suppliers, and partners. While the strategic and operational impact of external integration and IOS adoption has been extensively studied, much less attention has been paid to the organizational and technical design of electronic relationships. The objective of our longitudinal research project is the development of a framework for understanding and explaining B2B integration. Drawing on existing literature and empirical cases we present a reference model (a classification scheme for B2B Integration). The reference model comprises technical, organizational, and institutional levels to reflect the multiple facets of B2B integration. In this paper we investigate the current state of electronic collaboration in global supply chains focussing on the technical view. Using an in-depth case analysis we identify five integration scenarios. In the subsequent confirmatory phase of the research we analyse 112 real-world company cases to validate these five integration scenarios. Our research advances and deepens existing studies by developing a B2B reference model, which reflects the current state of practice and is independent of specific implementation technologies. In the next stage of the research the emerging reference model will be extended to create an assessment model for analysing the maturity level of a given company in a specific supply chain.     

Experiences from using a UML-based method for trust analysis in an industrial project on electronic procurement

This paper reports on experiences from using a UML-based method for trust analysis in an industrial project. The overall aim of the trust analysis method is to provide a sound basis for making trust policy decisions. The method makes use of UML sequence diagrams extended with constructs for probabilistic choice and subjective belief, as well as the capture of policy rules. The trust analysis method is evaluated with respect to a set of criteria. The industrial project focused on the modeling and analysis of a public electronic procurement (eProcurement) system making use of a validation authority service for validating electronic certificates and signatures.     

Reaching into patients’ homes – participatory designed AAL services

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) offers possibilities for promising new IT-based health care services that are resulting in new challenges for its design process. We introduce a novel approach for engineering AAL services (AALSDA) which combines methods from service engineering and participatory design. We demonstrate this approach by developing and implementing an electronic data capture system, NuTrack, for self-reporting of nutrition status. The approach uses different concepts for AAL service design and delivery: service engineering for standardizing and structuring service processes, reasonable IT-support for automation of parts of services that need no person–to-person interaction, participatory design to integrate end-users in the development process, and patient integration for personalizing and improving the depth of performance of service providers’ service delivery. For illustration, we present the case of chronic disease patients suffering from impaired fine motor skills. Our approach is applied in a pilot study with prototypes tested in focus groups and workshops with patients, caregivers and physicians. The results demonstrate good applicability and feasibility of the concept, and provide new insights for the future design, development and implementation of AAL services.     

Diverse feature set based Keyphrase extraction and indexing techniques

The internet changed the way that people communicate, and this has led to a vast amount of Text that is available in electronic format. It includes things like e-mail, technical and scientific reports, tweets, physician notes and military field reports. Providing key-phrases for these extensive text collections thus allows users to grab the essence of the lengthy contents quickly and helps to locate information with high efficiency. While designing a Keyword Extraction and Indexing system, it is essential to pick unique properties, called features. In this article, we proposed different unsupervised keyword extraction approaches, which is independent of the structure, size and domain of the documents. The proposed method relies on the novel and cognitive inspired set of standard, phrase, word embedding and external knowledge source features. The individual and selected feature results are reported through experimentation on four different datasets viz. SemEval, KDD, Inspec, and DUC. The selected (feature selection) and word embedding based features are the best features set to be used for keywords extraction and indexing among all mentioned datasets. That is the proposed distributed word vector with additional knowledge improves the results significantly over the use of individual features, combined features after feature selection and state-of-the-art. After successfully achieving the objective of developing various keyphrase extraction methods we also experimented it for document classification task.

     

电子式电能表可靠性预测方法的研究

随着电子设备复杂程度越来越高,电子设备的可靠性要求也越来越突出。由于影响电子式电能表不运行的因素比感应式电能表更多更复杂,对电子式电能表的可靠性提出了更高的要求。通过分析电子电能表可靠性评估技术的发展现状及存在的问题,结合电能表自身的技术特点及可靠性评估技术要求,提出了加速寿命试验和元器件应力法两种预测方法,这两种方法是开展电子式电能表可靠性预测的最实用、最具理论价值和工程应用价值的技术方法,有利于电力企业选用更高可靠性、长寿命的电子式电能表,大大降低电力系统经营运行成本。     

UK Film Companies: Project‐Based Organizations Lacking Entrepreneurship and Innovativeness?

The growth of project‐based forms of organization has been interpreted as a response to rapidly changing technological and market environments. Companies operating in this way are assumed to be inherently innovative, continually breaking up and reconfiguring teams of workers whose highly developed skills enable them to multi‐task and apply their knowledge in novel situations, in which new technology is swiftly assimilated and deployed. Project workers, who may engage in repeat contracting with different employers, belong to technical communities wherein knowledge is developed and resides. The transformation from vertical integration to project‐based working in the film industry would thus appear to privilege innovation. However, in the UK film industry at least, this study suggests that, in spite of freelance working, crew and technicians follow highly specialized, hierarchical careers, and that the organization of production is virtually the same as it was at the height of the Hollywood ‘Studio System’. Furthermore, it will be argued that the informal, reputational networks that operate in the UK industry may act as a barrier to development rather than as an engine of change.     

e-Government online forms: design guidelines for older adults in Europe

This paper reports on the findings of Delivering Inclusive Access to Disabled and Elderly Members of the community (DIADEM), a 3-year project, funded by the European Commission’s Sixth Framework Programme, to assist older adults when accessing, completing, and submitting online forms, by developing web-based assistive technologies that adapt the online form according to users’ needs. A user-centred approach is adopted to gain insights into the challenges faced by 80 older adults in three European countries as they interact with a representative sample of public service-based online forms. A thematic analysis is then carried out on the data, which revealed five over-arching themes that relate to the challenges faced by users: assistance, trust, layout, the technology paradigm, and language. From these themes, 23 online form design guidelines are derived, which provide valuable guidance for the development of the DIADEM application and for e-Government online form design for an ageing population in general.     

Deriving Goals from a Use-Case Based Requirements Specification

Use cases and scenarios have emerged as prominent analysis tools during requirements engineering activities due to both their richness and informality. In some instances, for example when a project’s budget or schedule time is reduced at short notice, practitioners have been known to adopt a collection of use cases as a suitable substitute for a requirements specification. Given the challenges inherent in managing large collections of scenarios, this shortcut is cause for concern and deserves focused attention. We describe our experiences during a goal-driven requirements analysis effort for an electronic commerce application. In particular, we identify the specific risks incurred, focusing more on the challenges imposed due to traceability, inconsistent use of terminology, incompleteness and consistency, rather than on traditional software project management risks. We conclude by discussing the impact of the lessons learned for requirements engineering in the context of building quality systems during goal and scenario analysis.     

A heuristics-based approach to reverse engineering of electronic services

Since the beginning of the electronic era, public administrations and enterprises have been developing services, through which citizens, businesses and customers can conduct their transactions with the offering entity. Each electronic service contains a substantial amount of knowledge in the form help texts, rules of use or legislation excerpts, examples, validation checks, etc. This knowledge has been extracted from domain experts when the services were developed, especially in the phases of analysis and design, and was subsequently translated into software. In the latter format though, knowledge cannot be readily used in organizational processes, such as knowledge sharing and development of new services. In this paper, we present an approach for reverse engineering electronic services in order to create knowledge items of high levels of abstraction, which can be used in knowledge sharing environments as well as in service development platforms. The proposed approach has been implemented and configured to generate artifacts for the SmartGov service development platform. Finally, an evaluation of the proposed approach is presented to assess its efficiency regarding various aspects of the reverse engineering process.