Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Identifying resources is a critical issue in the wide web information space. Several identification systems have been defined, each tailored to a specific domain or application field, and characterized by many limitations. In this paper we describe an identification system compliant to URN specification that has been defined and implemented specifically for the legal domain, while providing several innovative features. The system allows to easily manage references to juridical documents and to automate the distributed hyperlinking building process. Moreover, the system provides a resolution service associating to the logical identifier a physical resource (e.g. URL) and other facilities to ensure semantic coherence and unambiguousness in the uniform names attribution task. Finally, we briefly outline future work concerning the opportunity to investigate other relevant properties in the legal domain by representing laws as a directed graph.

In this paper a service-oriented architecture (SOA) is proposed to support the interaction with legacy Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and the implementation of value added data sharing services. In particular, we base our proposed architecture both on the standardization effort carried out by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and on current state-of-the-art Web Service middleware infrastructure. We have evaluated the proposed architecture in the context of GIS application integration in a departmental back-office scenario. The advantages of a service-oriented architecture are twofold: on one hand, it is possible to integrate several GIS application and data sources simply by wrapping their (legacy) services with appropriate interface and registering them in Web Service directories; on the other hand, this new service paradigm can be used to support the creation of completely new cartographic data sharing services.

In the next years the market for low value products such as online music and videos and the role of micropayment systems for selling such products are expected to grow substantially. The first generation micropayment systems appeared around 1994, with systems such as eCash, MilliCent and CyberCoin. These systems were unable to gain market share, however, and disappeared slowly in the late 1990s. The second generation micropayment systems appeared around 1999–2000, and are still operational. In this paper we present an overview of first and second generation micropayment systems, and compare their key characteristics to determine their success or failure. This paper explains why the first generation systems failed and concludes that second generation systems have a better chance for success than their predecessors.

Rapid developments in retail electronic payments industry increase complexity and result in fragmented view of the market. Key players in the domain need compact tools for analysis and decision support. This paper proposes a generic value framework for retail electronic payments industry, which is based on the concept of value network and consists part of an ongoing work towards an integrated decision support environment for actors in the payments industry. We use value network approach for the analysis of retail electronic payments aiming to provide a useful tool for better understanding of payments domain.

A growing challenge for the companies in the e-business era is customer retention. In today’s global economy this task is getting, at the same time, more difficult and more important. In order to retain the potentially good customers and to improve their buying attitude this paper proposes to calculate personalized discounts. This calculus is based on a fuzzy classification which can derive the customers’ value for an enterprise. This approach allows the company to drive the customer equity which treats the customers according to their real value in order to maximize its profit.

It is usually assumed that systems share an agreed model of business protocol to implement consistent exchange of series of business messages between eBusiness processes. R&Ds based on this approach are making progress such as model repository technology, business process modeling and business process description languages. This assumption, however, is not always satisfied when considering flexible and free dealings among independent and autonomous eBusiness systems demanded in future eBusiness environment, where systems having their own way of feasible interactions without an agreed business protocol model unexpectedly encounter each other, and want to execute business conversation using their best efforts.

We propose a solution to the above challenge in this paper, taking an approach: Each system exposes a model specifying possible interfaces and behavior; Systems exchange exposed models; Each system reduces its exposed model adjusting to the opponent system; Then, systems begin business conversation if both models were successfully reduced. The paper provides a formal definition of exposed models and an algorithm to reduce exposed models, and presents results using experimental implementation showing appropriateness of the proposed definition and algorithm. It also discusses matching methods of business resource definitions used in the algorithm. The results firstly target eBusiness application but are also applicable to dynamic protocol generations in other areas including robots, mobile devices and ubiquitous environments.

In this paper we present our approach to active marketing in supermarkets, with an extensive use of radio-frequency identifiers (RFIDs) of goods and locations, and personal, mobile communication devices of clients. Our solution is based on personalized filtering of RFID-related marketing info by the use of software agents. As an implementation base we use the Agent Computing Environment (ACE) framework. ACE agents are partially executed in clients’ mobile devices, and partially in the local area network of a supermarket. These agents are able to filter broadcasted marketing information according to detailed user needs, technical restrictions for end-user device, date and time, previous contacts, etc. Several strategies are proposed to use ACE agents to support everyday shopping in a supermarket, including maintaining shopping lists, personal marketing firewalls, and monitoring for changes.

Most developments and applications of current eBusiness systems focus on large enterprise systems. HTTP based full implementation of the Internet/Web protocol stack is used in such environment. On the other hand, small businesses or community works require simpler and smaller implementation not assuming big computer resource. This requirement exists also in other business-like environments such as robot communication, mobile devices and ubiquitous environment. Essential requirements for HTTP infrastructure are (1) to support HTTP protocol, and (2) to enable peer-to-peer communication. Currently existing infrastructures such as Apache and Mozilla, however, support more and do not fit to smaller and simpler applications. They were originally developed considering Web document access applications and have large functionality unnecessary for eBusiness communication. To solve this problem, we developed a new open source middleware essentially supporting HTTP and having both server and client feature called SMACH (Smart Communicator for HTTP). SMACH is designed based on three policies: small, bidirectional, and HTTP protocol focused. It supports minimum but enough HTTP communication function and symmetric APIs for server and client applications, having multi-threading based architecture with persistent TCP/IP connection pursuing maximum performance in small memory environments. SMACH can communicate with major existing products including Apache, IIS, Mozilla and IE, achieving high performance and small executable size. This paper provides its development policy, function, architecture, and results of interoperability tests and performance evaluation.

Mobile portal plays an important role in mobile commerce market. Current literature focuses on static analysis on the value chain of mobile portals. This article provides a dynamic perspective on mobile portal strategy. Drawing upon network economics, we describe mobile portal implementation as a four-phase process. In different phase, a portal provider has various challenges to overcome and adopt diverse strategies, and correspondingly the regulator has different foci. The conceptual framework proposed in this article offers a basis for further analyses on the market dynamics of mobile commerce, and can be generalized to studying other networked technologies.

Web service technology enables organizations to open up their business processes and engage in tightly coupled business networks to jointly offer goods and services. This paper systematically investigates all decisions that have to be made in the design of such networks and the processes carried out by its participants. Three areas of different kinds of design decisions are identified: the value modeling area, which addresses economic viability of the network, the collaboration modeling area, which addresses how business partners interact to produce the goods or services identified in the value modeling area, and the workflow modeling area, which addresses the design of internal processes needed for the interactions identified in the collaboration modeling area. We show, by reporting on a real-world case study, that there are significant differences between these areas: design decisions are unique for each area, IT support for collaboration processes is orthogonal to IT support for workflows, and the role of web choreography standards such as BPEL4WS differs for both of them.