Enterprise IT infrastructure is getting increasingly complex. With the increase in complexity has arisen the need to manage it. Management in general can be seen as the process of assuring that a managed entity meets its expectations in a controlled and predictable manner. Examples of managed entities are not only components, entire systems, processes, but also people such as employees, developers, or operators, and entire organizations. Traditional management has addressed some of these issues in varied manner. The emergence of Web services has added a new complexity to the management problem and poses a new set of problems. But it also adds to the mix a set of technologies that will make the task of management simpler. Management of Web services will be critical as businesses come to rely on them as a substantial source of their revenue. The book tries to cover the broad area of web services, the concepts, implications for the enterprise, issues involved in their management and how they are being used for management themselves. The book is intended as a reference for current practice and future directions for web services and their management. The book is directed at: * Computing professionals, academicians and students to learn about the important concepts behind the web services paradigm and how it impacts the enterprise in general and how it affects traditional application, network and system management.

This book includes 23 papers dealing with the impact of modern information and communication technologies that support a wide variety of communities: local communities, virtual communities, and communities of practice, such as knowledge communities and scientific communities. The volume is the result of the second multidisciplinary "Communities and Technologies Conference," a major event in this emerging research field. The various chapters discuss how communities are affected by technologies, and how understanding of the way that communities function can be used in improving information systems design. This state of the art overview will be of interest to computer and information scientists, social scientists and practitioners alike.

E-commerce has passed through a number of stages in the minds of most readers of the daily press. Initially it was the province of the specialist and considered almost irrelevant to the needs and activities of everyday life - companies looking for venture capital in this area had little if any chance of obtaining sufficient funds from the rather conservative investors who provided the only source of start-up capital. Then came the dot. com boom -and suddenly e-commerce was the most exciting topic possible Venture capital was available from every possible source and almost any company with a . com in its name could be assured of instant funding on request. This boom was, inevitably, followed by the dot. com bust and the press wamed that the days of e-commerce were gone, perhaps never to return. This apparently confusing 'stages of growth' model is in reality nothing ofthe sort. E-commerce is simply the logical outcome of combining computers with tele communications networks. The astonishing changes which a global economy has brought with it are reflected in the changes to the way we do business which are increasingly synonymous with e-commerce. Indeed, the term e-commerce itself is coming to mean only the transaction-based component of e-business-'any process that a business organisation conducts over a computer-mediated network' as Thomas Mesenbourg ofthe U. S. Census Bureau said in 1999."

Information security concerns the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information processed by a computer system. With an emphasis on prevention, traditional information security research has focused little on the ability to survive successful attacks, which can seriously impair the integrity and availability of a system. Trusted Recovery And Defensive Information Warfare uses database trusted recovery, as an example, to illustrate the principles of trusted recovery in defensive information warfare. Traditional database recovery mechanisms do not address trusted recovery, except for complete rollbacks, which undo the work of benign transactions as well as malicious ones, and compensating transactions, whose utility depends on application semantics. Database trusted recovery faces a set of unique challenges. In particular, trusted database recovery is complicated mainly by (a) the presence of benign transactions that depend, directly or indirectly on malicious transactions; and (b) the requirement by many mission-critical database applications that trusted recovery should be done on-the-fly without blocking the execution of new user transactions. Trusted Recovery And Defensive Information Warfare proposes a new model and a set of innovative algorithms for database trusted recovery. Both read-write dependency based and semantics based trusted recovery algorithms are proposed. Both static and dynamic database trusted recovery algorithms are proposed. These algorithms can typically save a lot of work by innocent users and can satisfy a variety of attack recovery requirements of real world database applications. Trusted Recovery And Defensive Information Warfare is suitable as a secondary text for a graduate level course in computer science, and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in information security.

Mobile Information Systems II provides a collection of research on the planning, analysis, design, construction, modification, implementation, utilization, evaluation, and management of mobile information systems. The articles focus on the implications of this research in the world of commerce, and address technical issues and constraints on mobile information systems functionalities and design.

One of the fast growing elements of the Internet is electronic commerce, which refers to the use of electronic means to conduct business transactions within or across business entities. Nearly 80 percent of all Fortune 500 companies have been doing their core business through the Internet. Many issues, and societal implications of electronic commerce, are the subjects of recent research. A supply chain consists of all the entities and activities that enable the production, distribution, and delivery of products and services to consumers. Research in designing and managing supply chains has rapidly expanded during the last decade. In addition, increased and accessible computing power and modeling capabilities have spurred this growth, enabling researchers to simultaneously consider the many interrelated variables and decisions of a supply chain in a single tractable model.

The use of the internet for commerce has spawned a variety of auctions, marketplaces, and exchanges for trading everything from bandwidth to books. Mechanisms for bidding agents, dynamic pricing, and combinatorial bids are being implemented in support of internet-based auctions, giving rise to new versions of optimization and resource allocation models. This volume, a collection of papers from an IMA "Hot Topics" workshop in internet auctions, includes descriptions of real and proposed auctions, complete with mathematical model formulations, theoretical results, solution approaches, and computational studies.
This volume also provides a mathematical programming perspective on open questions in auction theory, and provides a glimpse of the growing area of dynamic pricing.

This book records one of the continuous attempts of the IFIP Working Group 8. 2, studying the interaction of information systems and the organization, to explore and understand the shifting boundaries and dependencies between organizational activities and their computer support. The book marks the result of the IFIP WG 8. 2 conference on "Designing Ubiquitous Information Environments: Socio-Technical Issues and Challenges. " Since its inception in the late 1970s, IFIP WG 8. 2 has sought to understand how computer-based information systems interact and must be designed as an integrated part of the organizational design. At that time, information systems handled repetitive and remote back-office functions and the main concern was work task design for repetitive input tasks and the potential impact of improved information support on organizational decision-making and structure. The focus of the information system design shifted in the 1980s when computers became part of the furniture and moved into the office. Reflecting this significant change, IFIP WG 8. 2 in 1989 organized a conference dedicated to the design and impact of desktop technology in order to examine how organizational processes and the locus of action changed when the computer was moved into the office. Sixteen years later, we are experiencing another significant change. Computers are now becoming part of our body and sensory system and will move out of the traditional office locations and into the wilderness. Again, IFIP WG 8.

2.1 E-Government: e-Governance and e-Democracy The term Electronic Government (e-Government), as an expression, was coined after the example of Electronic Commerce. In spite of being a relatively recent expression, e-Government designates a field of activity that has been with us for several decades and which has attained a high level of penetration in many countries2. What has been observed over the recent years is a shift on the broadness of the e-Government concept. The ideas inside e-Governance and e- Democracy are to some extent promising big changes in public administration. The demand now is not only simply delivering a service - line. It is to deliver complex and new services, which are all citizen-centric. Another important demand is related to the improvement of citizen's participation in governmental processes and decisions so that the governments' transparency and legitimacy are enforced. In order to fulfill these new demands, a lot of research has been done over the recent years (see Section 3) but many challenges are still to be faced, not only in the technological field, but also in the political and social aspects.

Knowledge-Based Information Retrieval and Filtering from the Web contains fifteen chapters, contributed by leading international researchers, addressing the matter of information retrieval, filtering and management of the information on the Internet. The research presented deals with the need to find proper solutions for the description of the information found on the Internet, the description of the information consumers need, the algorithms for retrieving documents (and indirectly, the information embedded in them), and the presentation of the information found. The chapters include:
-Ontological representation of knowledge on the WWW;
-Information extraction;
-Information retrieval and administration of distributed documents;
-Hard and soft modeling based knowledge capture;
-Summarization of texts found on the WWW;
-User profiles and personalization for web-based information retrieval system;
-Information retrieval under constricted bandwidth;
-Multilingual WWW;
-Generic hierarchical classification using the single-link clustering;
-Clustering of documents on the basis of text fuzzy similarity;
-Intelligent agents for document categorization and adaptive filtering;
-Multimedia retrieval and data mining for E-commerce and E-business;
-A Web-based approach to competitive intelligence;
-Learning ontologies for domain-specific information retrieval;
-An open, decentralized architecture for searching for, and publishing information in distributed systems.

Electronic payment is the economic backbone of all e-commerce transactions. This book covers the major subjects related to e-payment such as, for example, public key infrastructure, smart cards, payment agents, digital cash, SET protocols, and micro-payment. Its first part covers the infrastructure for secure e-payment over the Internet, whereas in the second part a variety of e-payment methods and systems are described.

This edited volume offers a well-written and sound technical overview of the state of the art in e-payment for e-business developers, graduate students, and consultants. It is also ideally suited for classes and training courses in e-commerce or e-payment.

This book contains the best papers of the First International Conference on e-Business and Telecommunication Networks held in 2004. The book presents recent research on e-business and telecommunication networks. It includes analyses aspects of global communication information systems and services, and describes security and reliability problems and solutions in information systems and networks.

"Content Delivery Networks" enables the readers to understand the basics, to identify the underlying technology, to summarize their knowledge on concepts, ideas, principles and various paradigms which span on broad CDNs areas. Therefore, aspects of CDNs in terms of basics, design process, practice, techniques, performances, platforms, applications, and experimental results have been presented in a proper order. Fundamental methods, initiatives, significant research results, as well as references for further study have also been provided. Comparison of different design and development approaches are described at the appropriate places so that new researchers as well as advanced practitioners can use the CDNs evaluation as a research roadmap. All the contributions have been reviewed, edited, processed, and placed in the appropriate order to maintain consistency so that any reader irrespective of their level of knowledge and technological skills in CDNs would get the most out of it. The book is organized into three parts, namely, Part I: CDN Fundamentals; Part II: CDN Modeling and Performance; and Part III: Advanced CDN Platforms and Applications. The organization ensures the smooth flow of material as successive chapters build on prior ones.

Ontologies have been developed and investigated for some time in artificial intelligence to facilitate knowledge sharing and reuse. More recently, the notion of ontologies has attracted attention from fields such as databases, intelligent information integration, cooperative information systems, information retrieval, electronic commerce, enterprise application integration, and knowledge management. This broadened interest in ontologies is based on the feature that they provide a machine-processable semantics of information sources that can be communicated among agents as well as between software artifacts and humans. This feature makes ontologies the backbone technology of the next web generation, i.e., the Semantic Web. Ontologies are currently applied in areas such as knowledge management in large company-wide networks and call centers, and in B2C, B2G, and B2B electronic commerce. In a nutshell, ontologies enable effective and efficient access to heterogeneous and distributed information sources. Given the increasing amount of information available online, this kind of support is becoming more important day by day.

The author systematically introduces the notion of ontologies to the non-expert reader and demonstrates in detail how to apply this conceptual framework for improved intranet retrieval of corporate information and knowledge and for enhanced Internet-based electronic commerce. He also describes ontology languages (XML, RDF, and OWL) and ontology tools, and the application of ontologies.

In addition to structural improvements, the second edition covers recent developments relating to the Semantic Web, and emerging web-based standard languages.

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The World Wide Web has become a ubiquitous global tool, used for finding infor mation, communicating ideas, carrying out distributed computation and conducting business, learning and science. The Web is highly dynamic in both the content and quantity of the information that it encompasses. In order to fully exploit its enormous potential as a global repository of information, we need to understand how its size, topology and content are evolv ing. This then allows the development of new techniques for locating and retrieving information that are better able to adapt and scale to its change and growth. The Web's users are highly diverse and can access the Web from a variety of devices and interfaces, at different places and times, and for varying purposes. We thus also need techniques for personalising the presentation and content of Web based information depending on how it is being accessed and on the specific user's requirements. As well as being accessed by human users, the Web is also accessed by appli cations. New applications in areas such as e-business, sensor networks, and mobile and ubiquitous computing need to be able to detect and react quickly to events and changes in Web-based information. Traditional approaches using query-based 'pull' of information to find out if events or changes of interest have occurred may not be able to scale to the quantity and frequency of events and changes being generated, and new 'push' -based techniques are needed."

The European Molecular Biology Open Software Suite (EMBOSS) is a high quality package of open source software tools for molecular biology. It includes over 200 applications integrated with a range of popular third party software packages under a consistent and powerful command line interface. The tools are available from a wide range of graphical interfaces, including easy to use web interfaces and powerful workflow software. The EMBOSS Administrator's Guide is the official, definitive and comprehensive guide to EMBOSS installation and maintenance: * Find all the information needed to configure, install and maintain EMBOSS, including recent additions for version 6.2 * Step-by-step instructions with real-world examples - saves readers time and helps them avoid the pitfalls on all the common platforms * In-depth reference to database configuration - learn how to set up and use databases under EMBOSS * Includes EMBOSS Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) with answers - quickly find solutions to common problems

This edited book serves as a companion volume to the Seventh INFORMS Telecommunications Conference held in Boca Raton, Florida, March 7-10, 2004. The 18 papers in this book were carefully selected after a thorough re view process. The research presented within these articles focuses on the latest methodological developments in three key areas-pricing of telecommunica tions services, network design, and resource allocation-that are most relevant to current telecommunications planning. With the global deregulation of the telecommunications industry, effective pricing and revenue management, as well as an understanding of competi tive pressures are key factors that will improve revenue in telecommunica tions companies. Chapters 1-5 address these topics by focusing on pricing of telecommunications services. They present some novel ideas related to pricing (including auction-based pricing of network bandwidth) and modeling compe tition in the industry. The successful telecommunications companies of the future will likely be the ones that can minimize their costs while meeting customer expectations. In this context the optimal design/provisioning of telecommunication networks plays an important role. Chapters 6-12 address these topics by focusing on net work design for a wide range of technologies including SONET, SDH, WDM, and MPLS. They include the latest research developments related to the mod eling and solving of network design problems. Day-to-day management/control of telecommunications networks is depen dent upon the optimal allocation of resources. Chapters 13-18 provide insight ful solutions to several intriguing resource allocation problems."

Lean Manufacturing has proved to be one of the most successful and most powerful production business systems over the last decades. Its application enabled many companies to make a big leap towards better utilization of resources and thus provide better service to the customers through faster response, higher quality and lowered costs. Lean is often described as "eyes for flow and eyes for muda" philosophy. It simply means that value is created only when all the resources flow through the system. If the flow is stopped no value but only costs and time are added, which is muda (Jap. waste). Since the philosophy was born at the Toyota many solutions were tailored for the high volume environment. But in turbulent, fast-changing market environment and progressing globalization, customers tend to require more customization, lower volumes and higher variety at much less cost and of better quality. This calls for adaptation of existing lean techniques and exploration of the new waste-free solutions that go far beyond manufacturing. This book brings together the opinions of a number of leading academics and researchers from around the world responding to those emerging needs. They tried to find answer to the question how to move forward from "Spaghetti World" of supply, production, distribution, sales, administration, product development, logistics, accounting, etc. Through individual chapters in this book authors present their views, approaches, concepts and developed tools. The reader will learn the key issues currently being addressed in production management research and practice throughout the world.

This book uses action research to conduct research activities in information technology and systems. It covers the methodological issues that arise when action research methods are conducted, provides examples of action research in practice, and summarizes the philosophical foundations of action research and its application as a methodology in Information Systems research and research programs.

This book goes beyond the discussion of global databases and presents a general Enterprise Resources Market model to facilitate the management and integration of enterprise information resources in a cooperating mode. It is the first book to analyze the problem from the perspective of information management and to present a solution for a key aspect of the cooperation problem on-demand information exchange.

This is the first comprehensive book about the emerging technology of Network-Centric Service-Oriented Enterprise (NCSOE). It establishes a system-of-systems (SoS) view of information technologies. The book discusses the practical capability of a competitive ecosystem in terms of how to achieve decision superiority from exploiting information and situation awareness as a key enabler in multiple sectors of the economy.

Intelligent Collaborative e-Learning Systems and Applications is a major research theme in CSCL and CSCW research community. It comprises a variety of research topics that focus on developing systems that are more powerful and flexible and also more adaptable to the learning process and thus provide better answers to the paradigmatic principles of on-line collaborative learning and work. The chapters collected in this book provide new insights, findings and approaches both on the analysis and the development of more powerful e-collaboration settings. Researchers will find in this book the latest trends in these research topics. On the other hand, academics will find practical insights on how to use conceptual and experimental approaches in their daily tasks. Finally, developers from CSCL community can be inspired and put in practice the proposed models and evaluate them for the specific purposes of their own work and context.

This book applies the concept of synchronization to security of global heterogeneous and hetero-standard systems by modeling the relationship of risk access spots (RAS) between advanced and developing economies network platforms. The proposed model is more effective in securing the electronic security gap between these economies with reference to real life applications, such as electronic fund transfer in electronic business. This process involves the identification of vulnerabilities on communication networks. This book also presents a model and simulation of an integrated approach to security and risk known as Service Server Transmission Model (SSTM).

Data Mining for Business Applications presents the state-of-the-art research and development outcomes on methodologies, techniques, approaches and successful applications in the area. The contributions mark a paradigm shift from "data-centered pattern mining" to "domain driven actionable knowledge discovery" for next-generation KDD research and applications. The contents identify how KDD techniques can better contribute to critical domain problems in theory and practice, and strengthen business intelligence in complex enterprise applications. The volume also explores challenges and directions for future research and development in the dialogue between academia and business.

The IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics (ISI) and Pacific Asia Workshop on Intelligence and Security Informatics (PAISI) conference series (http: //www. isiconference. org) have drawn significant attention in the recent years. Intelligence and Security Informatics is concerned with the study of the dev- opment and use of advanced information technologies and systems for national, int- national, and societal security-related applications. The ISI conference series have brought together academic researchers, law enforcement and intelligence experts, - formation technology consultant and practitioners to discuss their research and pr- tice related to various ISI topics including ISI data management, data and text mining for ISI applications, terrorism informatics, deception and intent detection, terrorist and criminal social network analysis, public health and bio-security, crime analysis, - ber-infrastructure protection, transportation infrastructure security, policy studies and evaluation, information assurance, among others. In this book, we collect the work of the most active researchers in the area. Topics include data and text mining in terr- ism, information sharing, social network analysis, Web-based intelligence monitoring and analysis, crime data analysis, infrastructure protection, deception and intent det- tion and more. Scope and Organization The book is organized in four major areas. The first unit focuses on the terrorism - formatics and data mining. The second unit discusses the intelligence and crime analysis. The third unit covers access control, infrastructure protection, and privacy. The forth unit presents surveillance and emergency response