As virtual reality approaches mainstream consumer use, new research and innovations in the field have impacted how we view and can use this technology across a wide range of industries. Advancements in this technology have led to recent breakthroughs in sound, perception, and visual processing that take virtual reality to new dimensions. As such, research is needed to support the adoption of these new methods and applications. Cases on Immersive Virtual Reality Techniques is an essential reference source that discusses new applications of virtual reality and how they can be integrated with immersive techniques and computer resources. Featuring research on topics such as 3D modeling, cognitive load, and motion cueing, this book is ideally designed for educators, academicians, researchers, and students seeking coverage on the applications of collaborative virtual environments.

Web Systems Design and Online Consumer Behavior takes and interdisciplinary approach toward systems design in the online environment by providing an understanding of how consumers behave while shopping online and how certain system design elements may impact consumers' perceptions, attitude, intentions, and actual behavior. This book contains theoretical and empirical research from expert scholars in a number of areas including communications, psychology, marketing and advertising, and information systems. This book provides an integrated look at the subject area as described above to further our understanding of the linkage among various disciplines inherently connected with one another in electronic commerce.

Jerome McGann has been at the forefront of the digital revolution in the humanities. His pioneering critical projects on the World Wide Web have redefined traditional notions about interpreting literature. In this trailblazing book, McGann explores the profound implications digital media have for the core critical tasks of the humanities.Drawing on his work as editor of the acclaimed hypertext project The Rossetti Archive, he sets the foundation for a new critical practice for the digital age. Digital media, he demonstrates, can do much more than organize access to great works of literature and art. Beyond their acknowledged editorial and archival capabilities, digital media are also critical tools of unprecedented power. In McGann’s practical vision, digital tools give scholars a flexible, dynamic means for interpreting expressive works—especially those that combine text and image. Radiant Textuality demonstrates eloquently how new technologies can deepen our understanding of complex, multi-layered works of the human imagination in ways never before thought possible.

This book introduces new trends of theory and practice of information technologies in tourism. The book does not handle only the fundamental contribution, but also discusses innovative and emerging technologies to promote and develop new generation tourism informatics theory and their applications. Some chapters are concerned with data analysis, web technologies, social media and their case studies. Travel information on the web provided by travelers is very useful for other travelers make their travel plan. A chapter in this book proposes a method for interactive retrieval of information on accommodation facilities to support travelling customers in their travel preparations. Also an adaptive user interface for personalized transportation guidance system is proposed. Another chapter in this book shows a novel support system for the collaborative tourism planning by using the case reports that are collected via Internet. Also, a system for recommending hotels for the users is proposed and evaluated. Other chapters are concerned with recommendation, personalization and other emerging technologies.

The Semantic Web has evolved as a blueprint for a knowledge-based framework aimed at crossing the chasm from the current Web of unstructured information resources to a Web equipped with metadata and oriented to delegating tasks to software agents. Semantic Web Personalization and Context Awareness: Management of Personal Identities and Social Networking communicates relevant recent research in Semantic Web-based personalization as applied to the context of information systems. This book reviews knowledge engineering for organizational applications, and Semantic Web approaches to information systems and ontology-based information systems research, as well as the diverse underlying database and knowledge representation aspects that impact personalization and customization.

Synchronizing E-Security is a critical investigation and empirical analysis of studies conducted among companies that support electronic commerce transactions in both advanced and developing economies. This book presents insights into the validity and credibility of current risk assessment methods that support electronic transactions in the global economy. Synchronizing E-Security focuses on a number of case studies of IT companies, within selected countries in West Africa, Europe, Asia and the United States. The foundation of this work is based on previous studies by Williams G., Avudzivi P.V (Hawaii 2002) on the retrospective view of information security management and the impact of tele-banking on the end-user.

Mining the World Wide Web: An Information Search Approach explores the concepts and techniques of Web mining, a promising and rapidly growing field of computer science research. Web mining is a multidisciplinary field, drawing on such areas as artificial intelligence, databases, data mining, data warehousing, data visualization, information retrieval, machine learning, markup languages, pattern recognition, statistics, and Web technology. Mining the World Wide Web presents the Web mining material from an information search perspective, focusing on issues relating to the efficiency, feasibility, scalability and usability of searching techniques for Web mining. Mining the World Wide Web is designed for researchers and developers of Web information systems and also serves as an excellent supplemental reference to advanced level courses in data mining, databases and information retrieval.

More objects and devices are connected to digital networks than ever before. Things - from your phone to your car, from the heating to the lights in your house - have gathered the ability to sense their environments and create information about what is happening. Things have become media, able to both generate and communicate information. This has become known as 'the internet of things'. In this accessible introduction, Graham Meikle and Mercedes Bunz observe its promises of convenience and the breaking of new frontiers in communication. They also raise urgent questions regarding ubiquitous surveillance and information security, as well as the transformation of intimate personal information into commercial data. Discussing the internet of things from a media and communication perspective, this book is an important resource for courses analysing the internet and society, and essential reading for anyone who wants to better understand the rapidly changing roles of our networked lives.

Social network analysis has created novel opportunities within the field of data science. The complexity of these networks requires new techniques to optimize the extraction of useful information. Graph Theoretic Approaches for Analyzing Large-Scale Social Networks is a pivotal reference source for the latest academic research on emerging algorithms and methods for the analysis of social networks. Highlighting a range of pertinent topics such as influence maximization, probabilistic exploration, and distributed memory, this book is ideally designed for academics, graduate students, professionals, and practitioners actively involved in the field of data science. The many academic areas covered in this publication include, but are not limited to: Content Specific Modeling Distributed Memory Graph Mining Influence Maximization Information Spread Control Link Prediction Probabilistic Exploration

Semantics, Web services, and Web processes promise better re-use, universal interoperability and integration. Semantics has been recognized as the primary tool to address the challenges of a broad spectrum of heterogeneity and for improving automation through machine understandable descriptions.

Semantic Web Services, Processes and Applications brings contributions from researchers who study, explore and understand the semantic enabling of all phases of semantic Web processes. This encompasses design, annotation, discovery, choreography and composition. Also this book presents fundamental capabilities and techniques associated with ontological modeling or services, annotation, matching and mapping, and reasoning. This is complemented by discussion of applications in e-Government and bioinformatics.

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Cyber Terrorism: Political and Economic Implications is a cyber terrorism brief that outlines many of the recent terrorist activities, political objectives, and their use of cyberspace. Much of this book is dedicated to illustrating the use of the global information infrastructure by terrorists for the communication and coordination of distributed terrorist cells, the gathering of target intelligence, and the use of cyber criminal activities as a force multiplier for both physical attacks and infrastructure destabilization. This book identifies the underlying technologies of the global information infrastructure as a means for presenting how critical this emerging domain has become. It then discusses the current attack methods and lays out a series of scenarios for key industry sectors. Lastly, ""Cyber Terrorism: Political and Economic Implications"" puts forward prevention and response policies for reducing cyber terrorism activities in the context of traditional information security objectives.

The Internet challenges many basic assumptions about the structure of business processes, channels of distribution, product marketing, competitiveness and resource management. It places new demands on organizations and those determining strategy and direction. There are tools and concepts that can enable managers to face these challenges and give them some appreciation of the consequences of this new technology. In this text, Dick Stroud looks at the business implications of the Internet at a strategic level. Without going into technical details, he looks at what is driving the development of the Internet and how it might impact on a number of aspects of an organization's operations. He then defines strategies that can be adopted and outlines the benefits and weaknesses of each, providing the diagnostic tools to enable managers to make decisions about their own businesses.

Internet gambling is a rapidly growing phenomenon, which has profound social, psychological, economic, political, and policy implications. Until recently, Internet gambling has been understudied by the research community, but now a growing body of literature is emerging, on all aspects of Internet gambling and its attendant implications.

As jurisdictions around the world grapple to understand the best way to respond to Internet gambling from a commercial, regulatory, and social perspective, scholarly studies of Internet gambling are becoming an ever more crucial resource. The Handbook of Internet Gambling consolidates this emerging body of literature into a single reference volume. Its twenty chapters comprise groundbreaking contributions from the world s leading authorities in the commercial, clinical, political and social aspects of Internet gambling.

It is sure to be a foundational resource for academics, students, regulators, politicians, policy makers, commercial providers, and health care professionals who have an interest in understanding the history, dynamics, and impacts of Internet gambling in a global context.

Mathematics teachers and school library media specialists will find this book a valuable resource for using the Web to promote critical thinking in the high school mathematics classroom. It is filled with instructional strategies and an expansive set of activities that cover a broad array of mathematics topics spanning from prealgebra through calculus. Teachers using the questions and activities in this book will help their students meet the standards set forth by the National Council for Teachers of Mathematics.

Various types of mathematics related sources on the Internet are outlined within this book, including data and simulations related to real world situations such as saving funds and computing interest earned for college, purchasing a home, or decoding train and plane schedules. The author develops a framework for critical thinking in mathematics and helps teachers create a supportive classroom environment. Each activity highlights a web source, the mathematics topics involved, the appropriate grade levels of study, possible student investigations, and related web sources for continued exploration, promoting a student-centered inquiry.

Human-Centered e-Business focuses on analysis, design and development of human-centered e-business systems. The authors illustrate the benefits of the human-centered approach in intelligent e-sales recruitment application, integrating data mining technology with decision support model for profiling transaction behavior of internet banking customers, user-centered context dependent data organization using XML, knowledge management, and optimizing the search process through human evaluation in an intelligent interactive multimedia application. The applications described in this work, facilitates both e-business analysis from a business professional's perspective, and human-centered system design from a system development perspective. These applications employ a range of internet and soft computing technologies.

The year 1997 found the members of the OCLC (Online Computer Library Center) cooperative in an expansive mood. More than 1,000 library leaders attended the OCLC President's Luncheon in San Francisco, where they celebrated OCLC's 30th anniversary. There were more than 25,000 libraries participating in the cooperative, including nearly 3,000 libraries in 62 countries outside the U.S., and the WorldCat database contained more than 37 million bibliographic records. Over the next ten years, the global digital library would indeed emerge, but in a form that few could have predicted. Against a backdrop of continuous technological change and the rapid growth of the Internet, the OCLC cooperative's WorldCat database continued to grow and was a central theme of the past decade. As the chapters in this book show, OCLC's chartered objectives of furthering access to the world's information and reducing the rate of rising library costs continue to resonate among libraries and librarians, as the OCLC cooperative enters its fifth decade. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Library Administration.

Today, social media have attracted the attention of political actors and administrative institutions to inform citizens as a prerequisite of open and transparent administration, deliver public services, contact stakeholders, revitalize democracy, encourage the cross-agency cooperation, and contribute to knowledge management. In this context, the social media tools can contribute to the emergence of citizen-oriented, open, transparent and participatory public administration. Taking advantage of the opportunities offered by social media is not limited to central government. Local governments deploy internet-based innovative technologies that complement traditional methods in implementing different functions. This book focuses on the relationship between the local governments and social media, deals with the change that social media have caused in the organization, understanding of service provision, performance of local governments and in the relationships between local governments and their partners, and aims to advance our theoretical and empirical understanding of the growing use of social media by local governments. This book will be of interest to researchers and students in e-government, public administration, political science, communication, information science, and social media. Government officials and public managers will also find practical use recommendations for social media in several aspects of local governance

Child pornography and the sexual abuse of children through misuse of the media and the Internet are complex yet closely related issues. Not only do they necessitate complex solutions, they also demand a social response from all sectors of society. This volume records the response of these various sectors and shows how individuals and organizations can cooperate effectively. It describes the major work being carried out in some African countries, in Albania, Brazil, Guatemala, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka, and shows the efforts being made to share information and build networks. A reference section provides the site locations of organizations that have made significant advances in protecting children online. In addition, this book offers an action plan to encourage cooperation with others in the same fields in a coherent and coordinated manner.

The rapid advancement of semantic web technologies, along with the fact that they are at various levels of maturity, has left many practitioners confused about the current state of these technologies. Focusing on the most mature technologies, Applied Semantic Web Technologies integrates theory with case studies to illustrate the history, current state, and future direction of the semantic web. It maintains an emphasis on real-world applications and examines the technical and practical issues related to the use of semantic technologies in intelligent information management. The book starts with an introduction to the fundamentals-reviewing ontology basics, ontology languages, and research related to ontology alignment, mediation, and mapping. Next, it covers ontology engineering issues and presents a collaborative ontology engineering tool that is an extension of the Semantic MediaWiki. Unveiling a novel approach to data and knowledge engineering, the text: Introduces cutting-edge taxonomy-aware algorithms Examines semantics-based service composition in transport logistics Offers ontology alignment tools that use information visualization techniques Explains how to enrich the representation of entity semantics in an ontology Addresses challenges in tackling the content creation bottleneck Using case studies, the book provides authoritative insights and highlights valuable lessons learned by the authors-information systems veterans with decades of experience. They explain how to create social ontologies and present examples of the application of semantic technologies in building automation, logistics, ontology-driven business process intelligence, decision making, and energy efficiency in smart homes.

This book introduces advanced semantic web technologies, illustrating their utility and highlighting their implementation in biological, medical, and clinical scenarios. It covers topics ranging from database, ontology, and visualization to semantic web services and workflows. The volume also details the factors impacting on the establishment of the semantic web in life science and the legal challenges that will impact on its proliferation.

Through the last decade, Internet technologies such as electronic commerce have experienced exponential growth, and emerging issues surrounding this phenomenon have necessitated the amassment of research on the cognitive impact of electronic commerce technologies around the world. Web Technologies for Commerce and Services Online delivers a global perspective on the influence of electronic commerce on organizational behavior, development, and management in organizations, discussing issues such as information security; strategic management of electronic commerce; organizational learning; business process management; mediated enterprises; and electronic marketplaces. With the new insights it delivers on this rapidly evolving technological and commercial domain, this incisive reference will prove an essential addition to library collections worldwide.