Details recent research in areas such as ontology design for information integration, metadata generation and management, and representation and management of distributed ontologies.

Provides decision support on the use of novel technologies, information about potential problems, and guidelines for the successful application of existing technologies.

As the Internet revolution continues to unfold and transform telecommunications, pressure is building for faster, less expensive, and more widely accessible broadband service. Such a development would facilitate improved and less expensive traditional applications such as voice telephony and web browsing. It would also enable new and useful applications such as Internet-based television, videoconferencing, and software distribution. Broadband has great potential to improve efficiency and productivity, even to improve national security in some cases. Broadband service and affordability, however, have consistently lagged well behind demand and progress in information technology, with damaging results. The Internet revolution remains incomplete and threatens to stagnate if the situation continues. In The Broadband Problem, economist and technology entrepreneur Charles H. Ferguson explains the causes and ramifications of this damaging bottleneck, and he offers suggestions on improving the current state of affairs. He asserts that current telecommunications law and policy have not provided sufficient levels of new entry, competition, and innovation in the local telecom market. The continuing dominance of ILECs (incumbent local exchange carriers) in that market impedes the healthy, and much-needed, development of an efficient broadband market. The result of these policy and market failures is inadequate technological progress, innovation, and productivity in advanced Internet services and telecommunication services generally. The broadband problem is holding us back, and thus must be addressed and solved. With this important volume, Charles Ferguson has contributed mightily to that mission.

The emergence of the Internet allows millions of people to use a variety of electronic information retrieval systems, such as: digital libraries, Web search engines, online databases, and online public access catalogs. ""Interactive Information Retrieval in Digital Environments"" provides theoretical framework in understanding the nature of information retrieval, and offers implications for the design and evolution of interactive information retrieval systems. ""Interactive Information Retrieval in Digital Environments"" includes the integration of existing frameworks on user-oriented information retrieval systems across multiple disciplines; the comprehensive review of empirical studies of interactive information retrieval systems for different types of users, tasks, and subtasks; and the discussion of how to evaluate interactive information retrieval systems.Researchers, designers, teachers, scholars, and professionals will gain the foundation for new research on this subject matter, and guidance to evaluate new information retrieval systems for the general public as well as for specific user groups.

Developing an Online Educational Curriculum: Techniques and Technologies acts as a guidebook for teachers and administrators as they look for support with their online education programs. It offers teaching suggestions for everything from course development to time management and community building. The book is designed to provide information to help teachers work more effectively with online tools, develop course materials for existing online courses, work with the internet as a medium of education and complete daily activities - such as evaluating assignments, lecturing and communicating with students more easily. Administrators are also given support in their efforts to recruit, train, and retain online teachers, allocate resources for online education and evaluate online materials for promotion and tenure.

The standards for usability and interaction design for Web sites and software are well known. While not everyone uses those standards, or uses them correctly, there is a large body of knowledge, best practice, and proven results in those fields, and a good education system for teaching professionals "how to." For the newer field of Web application design, however, designers are forced to reuse the old rules on a new platform. This book provides a roadmap that will allow readers to put complete working applications on the Web, display the results of a process that is running elsewhere, and update a database on a remote server using an Internet rather than a network connection.
Web Application Design Handbook describes the essential widgets and development tools that will the lead to the right design solutions for your Web application. Written by designers who have made significant contributions to Web-based application design, it delivers a thorough treatment of the subject for many different kinds of applications, and provides quick reference for designers looking for some fast design solutions and opportunities to enhance the Web application experience. This book adds flavor to the standard Web design genre by juxtaposing Web design with programming for the Web and covers design solutions and concepts, such as intelligent generalization, to help software teams successfully switch from one interface to another.
* The first interaction design book that focuses exclusively on Web applications.
* Full-color figures throughout the book.
* Serves as a "cheat sheet" or "fake book" for designers: a handy reference for standards, rules of thumb, and tricks of the trade.
* Applicable to new Web-based applications and for porting existing desktop applications to Web browsers.

The view presented in "The Internet and Its Protocols" is at once broad and deep. It covers all the common protocols and how they combine to create the Internet in its totality. More importantly, it describes each one completely, examining the requirements it addresses and the exact means by which it does its job. These descriptions include message flows, full message formats, and message exchanges for normal and error operation. They are supported by numerous diagrams and tables.
This book's comparative approach gives you something more valuable: insight into the decisions you face as you build and maintain your network, network device, or network application. Author Adrian Farrel s experience and advice will dramatically smooth your path as you work to offer improved performance and a wider range of services.
* Provides comprehensive, in-depth, and comparative coverage of the Internet Protocol (both IPv4 and IPv6) and its many related technologies.
* Written for developers, operators, and managers, and designed to be used as both an overview and a reference.
* Discusses major concepts in traffic engineering, providing detailed looks at MPLS and GMPLS and how they control both IP and non-IP traffic.
* Covers protocols for governing routing and transport, and for managing switches, components, and the network as a whole, along with higher-level application protocols.
* Offers thoughtful guidance on choosing between protocols, selecting features within a protocol, and other service- and performance-related decisions."

History teachers and school library media specialists will find this guide a valuable resource for creating technologically advanced, resource-based instructional units in American and World History in grades 7-12. It is filled with 150 recommended primary source Internet sites about history ranging from ancient civilizations to 1998 and is stocked with exciting, interesting, and challenging questions designed to stimulate students' critical thinking skills. Dr. Craver, who maintains an award-winning interactive Internet database and conducts technology workshops for school library media specialists, provides an indispensable tool to enable students to make the best use of the Internet for the study of history. Each site is accompanied by a summary that describes its contents and usefulness to history teachers and school library media specialists. The questions that follow are designed specifically to stimulate critical thinking skills. Critical thinking skills are deemed essential for students if they are to succeed academically and economically in the twenty-first century. An annotated appendix of selected primary source databases includes the Internet addresses for 60 additional primary source sites.

This book explains aspects of social networks, varying from development and application of new artificial intelligence and computational intelligence techniques for social networks to understanding the impact of social networks. Chapters 1 and 2 deal with the basic strategies towards social networks such as mining text from such networks and applying social network metrics using a hybrid approach; Chaps. 3 to 8 focus on the prime research areas in social networks: community detection, influence maximization and opinion mining. Chapter 9 to 13 concentrate on studying the impact and use of social networks in society, primarily in education, commerce, and crowd sourcing. The contributions provide a multidimensional approach, and the book will serve graduate students and researchers as a reference in computer science, electronics engineering, communications, and information technology.

While e-commerce has experienced meteoric growth recently, security risks have similarly grown in scope and magnitude. Three major factors have driven the security risks in e-commerce: the growing reliance on the electronic medium for a company's core business, the growing complexity of the software systems needed to support e-commerce, and the value of the digital assets brought online to an inherently insecure medium - the Internet. While security has long been a primary concern in e-commerce, more recently privacy has also grown in importance to consumers. Many of the same Internet technologies that make e-commerce possible also make it possible to create detailed profiles of an individual's purchases, to spy on individual Web usage habits, and even to peer into confidential files that reside on an individual's machine. E-Commerce Security and Privacy is the first volume to pull together leading researchers and practitioners in diverse areas of computer science and software engineering to explore their technical innovations to problems in security and privacy in e-commerce. The information is drawn from selected papers presented at the first Workshop on Security and Privacy in E-Commerce (WSPEC'00) held in Athens, Greece, November 4, 2000. As such, E-Commerce Security and Privacy introduces both practitioners and researchers to innovations in secure and private e-commerce. Practitioners will gain great insight from the case studies, and researchers will learn about state-of-the-art protocols in secure and private e-commerce that will serve as the basis for future innovations in applied e-commerce technologies. E-Commerce Security and Privacy is suitable as a secondary text for agraduate level course, and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in industry.

This visionary book presents an interdisciplinary and cogent approach to the issue of Internet governance and control. By examining five critical areas in which the tension between freedom and control is most palpable--fair competition and open access, free expression, intellectual property, privacy rights, and security--Spinello guides the reader on a tour of the emerging body of law and public policy that has attempted to control the anarchy of cyberspace. In so doing, he defends the credo of Internet self-regulation, asserting that the same powerful and flexible architectures that created the Internet as we know it today can be relied upon to aid the private sector in arriving at a workable, decentralized regulatory regime. Except in certain circumstances that require government involvement, self-regulation is not only viable but is a highly preferred alternative to the forced uniformity that centralized structures tend to impose.

Beginning with an exploration of the Internet's most important values, including universality, free expression, and open access, as well as its promise as a democratizing force, Spinello considers how we can most effectively preserve those values and fulfill that promise while curtailing the social harms that vex Internet users. How do we arrive at the right mixture of technology and policy so that the Internet does not lose its promise as a liberating technology? In examining this question, Spinello evaluates such architectures of control as filters and rights management protocols, which attempt to keep out unwanted information and protect intellectual property, respectively. He explores how these and other technologies can be designed and used responsibly so that online social order can be sustained with a minimal amount of government intervention.

The Social Web (including services such as MySpace, Flickr, last.fm, and WordPress) has captured the attention of millions of users as well as billions of dollars in investment and acquisition. Social websites, evolving around the connections between people and their objects of interest, are encountering boundaries in the areas of information integration, dissemination, reuse, portability, searchability, automation and demanding tasks like querying. The Semantic Web is an ideal platform for interlinking and performing operations on diverse person- and object-related data available from the Social Web, and has produced a variety of approaches to overcome the boundaries being experienced in Social Web application areas.

After a short overview of both the Social Web and the Semantic Web, Breslin et al. describe some popular social media and social networking applications, list their strengths and limitations, and describe some applications of Semantic Web technology to address their current shortcomings by enhancing them with semantics. Across these social websites, they demonstrate a twofold approach for interconnecting the islands that are social websites with semantic technologies, and for powering semantic applications with rich community-created content. They conclude with observations on how the application of Semantic Web technologies to the Social Web is leading towards the "Social Semantic Web" (sometimes also called "Web 3.0"), forming a network of interlinked and semantically-rich content and knowledge.

The book is intended for computer science professionals, researchers, and graduates interested in understanding the technologies and research issues involved in applying Semantic Web technologies to social software. Practitioners and developers interested in applications such as blogs, social networks or wikis will also learn about methods for increasing the levels of automation in these forms of Web communication.

The Web is growing at an astounding pace surpassing the 8 billion page mark. However, most pages are still designed for human consumption and cannot be processed by machines. This book provides a well-paced introduction to the Semantic Web. It covers a wide range of topics, from new trends (ontologies, rules) to existing technologies (Web Services and software agents) to more formal aspects (logic and inference). It includes: real-world (and complete) examples of the application of Semantic Web concepts; how the technology presented and discussed throughout the book can be extended to other application areas.

The Semantic Web aims at machine agents that thrive on explicitly specified semantics of content in order to search, filter, condense, or negotiate knowledge for their human users. A core technology for making the Semantic Web happen, but also to leverage application areas like Knowledge Management and E-Business, is the field of Semantic Annotation, which turns human-understandable content into a machine understandable form. This book reports on the broad range of technologies that are used to achieve this translation and nourish 3rd millennium applications. The book starts with a survey of the oldest semantic annotations, viz. indexing of publications in libraries. It continues with several techniques for the explicit construction of semantic annotations, including approaches for collaboration and Semantic Web metadata. One of the major means for improving the semantic annotation task is information extraction and much can be learned from the semantic tagging of linguistic corpora. In particular, information extraction is gaining prominence for automating the formerly purely manual annotation task - at least to some extent.An important subclass of information extraction tasks is the goal-oriented extraction of content from HTML and / or XML resources.

Private online digital currency systems offer people accessible, convenient, and inexpensive everyday financial tools outside of traditional bank-owned and operated platforms. Digital currency systems facilitate local and international fund transfers, online and offline payments, and simple cash-to-digital everyday financial products without the need for a conventional bank account of any retail bank product. Over the past several years, Bitcoin has grown into an efficient person-to-person and person-to-business payment system without the backing of any bank or financial institution. This phenomenon is producing a new level of an on- and offline commerce and a society much more attuned to digital currency systems. The Digital Currency Challenge details how new 2007-2008 U.S. legal issues surrounding digital currency products forced companies from the U.S. market and caused the Treasury Department to enact stricter regulations. Mullan profiles new and innovative present day digital currency systems, such as Bitcoin, and illustrates how software designers and monetary theorists use new technology to circumvent current U.S. regulations. This work also explains how new digital currency systems are not just software products, but tools providing financial freedom to people in countries all around the world.

In this book, the authors first address the research issues by providing a motivating scenario, followed by the exploration of the principles and techniques of the challenging topics. Then they solve the raised research issues by developing a series of methodologies. More specifically, the authors study the query optimization and tackle the query performance prediction for knowledge retrieval. They also handle unstructured data processing, data clustering for knowledge extraction. To optimize the queries issued through interfaces against knowledge bases, the authors propose a cache-based optimization layer between consumers and the querying interface to facilitate the querying and solve the latency issue. The cache depends on a novel learning method that considers the querying patterns from individual's historical queries without having knowledge of the backing systems of the knowledge base. To predict the query performance for appropriate query scheduling, the authors examine the queries' structural and syntactical features and apply multiple widely adopted prediction models. Their feature modelling approach eschews the knowledge requirement on both the querying languages and system. To extract knowledge from unstructured Web sources, the authors examine two kinds of Web sources containing unstructured data: the source code from Web repositories and the posts in programming question-answering communities. They use natural language processing techniques to pre-process the source codes and obtain the natural language elements. Then they apply traditional knowledge extraction techniques to extract knowledge. For the data from programming question-answering communities, the authors make the attempt towards building programming knowledge base by starting with paraphrase identification problems and develop novel features to accurately identify duplicate posts. For domain specific knowledge extraction, the authors propose to use a clustering technique to separate knowledge into different groups. They focus on developing a new clustering algorithm that uses manifold constraints in the optimization task and achieves fast and accurate performance. For each model and approach presented in this dissertation, the authors have conducted extensive experiments to evaluate it using either public dataset or synthetic data they generated.

'Securing Web Services' investigates the security-related specifications that encompass message level security, transactions, and identity management.

Electronic commerce is here to stay. No matter how big the dot-com crisis was or how far the e-entrepreneurs' shares fell in the market, the fact remains that there is still confidence in electronic trading. At least it would appear that investors are confident in e-companies again. However, not only trust of venture capitalists is of importance--consumers also have to have faith in on-line business. After all, without consumers there is no e-business. Interacting lawyers, technicians and economists are needed to create a trustworthy electronic commerce environment. To achieve this environment, thorough and inter-disciplinary research is required and that is exactly what this book is about. Researchers of the project Enabling Electronic Commerce from the Dutch universities of Tilburg and Eindhoven have chosen a number of e-topics to elaborate on trust from their point of view. This volume makes clear that the various disciplines can and will play a role in developing conditions for trust and thus contribute to a successful electronic market.

This book focuses on the modeling and management of spatial data in distributed systems. The authors have structured the contributions from internationally renowned researchers into four parts. The book offers researchers an excellent overview of the state-of-the-art in modeling and management of spatial data in distributed environments, while it may also be the basis of specialized courses on Web-based geographical information systems.

The importance of knowledge and information technology management has been emphasized both by researchers and practitioners in order for companies to compete in the global market. Now such technologies have become crucial in a sense that there is a need to understand the business and operations strategies, as well as how the development of IT would contribute to knowledge management and therefore increase competitiveness. Knowledge and Information Technology Management: Human and Social Perspectives strives to explore the human resource and social dimensions of knowledge and IT management, to discuss the opportunities and major issues related to the management of people along the supply chain in Internet marketing, and to provide an understanding of how the human resource and the IT management should complement each other for improved communication and competitiveness.

This book introduces a promising design for future Internet, the Smart Collaborative Identifier NETwork (SINET). By examining cutting-edge research from around the world, it is the first book to provide a comprehensive survey of SINET, including its basic theories and principles, a broad range of architectures, protocols, standards, and future research directions. For further investigation, the book also provides readers an experimental analysis of SINET to promote further, independent research. The second part of the book presents in detail key technologies in SINET such as scalable routing, efficient mapping systems, mobility management and security issues. In turn, the last part presents various implementations of SINET, assessing its merits. The authors believe SINET will greatly benefit researchers involved in designing future Internet thanks to its high degree of flexibility, security, manageability, mobility support and efficient resource utilization.

The use of geospatial technologies has become ubiquitous since the leading Internet vendors delivered a number of popular map websites. This book covers a wide spectrum of techniques, model methodologies and theories on development and applications of GIS relative to the internet. It includes coverage of business process services, and integration of GIS into global enterprise information systems and service architectures. The world's experts in this emerging field present examples and case studies for location-based services, coastal restoration, urban planning, battlefield planning, rehearsal environmental analysis and assessment.