The book presents a user-oriented methodology for formative (technology) assessment at the development of medical IT-based solutions throughout a system's life-cycle, i.e. from the conception of an idea to disposal of the materialized solution. The methodology developed was tested in a full scale prospective application. Three basic cognitions underpin the entire work: 1) the users of the medical application domain are responsible (and liable) for the level of quality of their service provision within the Healthcare scenario; 2) users are experts at their work (the Healthcare service), and the IT-professionals are not; and 3) introduction of a non-trivial IT-based solution implies re-engineering of the business of the organization into which it is introduced.

The ubiquity of modern technologies has allowed for increased connectivity between people and devices across the globe. This connected infrastructure of networks creates numerous opportunities for applications and uses. The Internet of Things: Breakthroughs in Research and Practice is an authoritative reference source for the latest academic material on the interconnectivity of networks and devices in the digital era and examines best practices for integrating this advanced connectivity across multiple fields. Featuring extensive coverage on innovative perspectives, such as secure computing, regulatory standards, and trust management, this book is ideally designed for engineers, researchers, professionals, graduate students, and practitioners seeking scholarly insights on the Internet of Things.

This book presents emerging trends in the evolution of service-oriented and enterprise architectures. New architectures and methods of both business and IT are integrating services to support mobility systems, Internet of Things, Ubiquitous Computing, collaborative and adaptive business processes, Big Data, and Cloud ecosystems. They inspire current and future digital strategies and create new opportunities for the digital transformation of next digital products and services. Services Oriented Architectures (SOA) and Enterprise Architectures (EA) have emerged as a useful framework for developing interoperable, large-scale systems, typically implementing various standards, like Web Services, REST, and Microservices. Managing the adaptation and evolution of such systems presents a great challenge. Service-Oriented Architecture enables flexibility through loose coupling, both between the services themselves and between the IT organizations that manage them. Enterprises evolve continuously by transforming and extending their services, processes and information systems. Enterprise Architectures provide a holistic blueprint to help define the structure and operation of an organization with the goal of determining how an organization can most effectively achieve its objectives. The book proposes several approaches to address the challenges of the service-oriented evolution of digital enterprise and software architectures.

As ubiquitous multimedia applications benefit from the rapid development of intelligent multimedia technologies, there is an inherent need to present frameworks, techniques and tools that adopt these technologies to a range of networking applications. Intelligent Multimedia Technologies for Networking Applications: Techniques and Tools promotes the discussion of specific solutions for improving the quality of multimedia experience while investigating issues arising from the deployment of techniques for adaptive video streaming. This reference source provides relevant theoretical frameworks and leading empirical research findings and is suitable for practitioners and researchers in the area of multimedia technology.

This fully revised and updated second edition of Understanding Digital Libraries focuses on the challenges faced by both librarians and computer scientists in a field that has been dramatically altered by the growth of the Web.
At every turn, the goal is practical: to show you how things you might need to do are already being done, or how they can be done. The first part of the book is devoted to technology and examines issues such as varying media requirements, indexing and classification, networks and distribution, and presentation. The second part of the book is concerned with the human contexts in which digital libraries function. Here you ll find specific and useful information on usability, preservation, scientific applications, and thorny legal and economic questions.
- Thoroughly updated and expanded from original edition to include recent research, case studies and new technologies
- For librarians and technologists alike, this book provides a thorough introduction to the interdisciplinary science of digital libraries
- Written by Michael Lesk, a legend in computer science and a leading figure in the digital library field.
- Provides insights into the integration of both the technical and non-technical aspects of digital libraries"

Location-based services (LBS) are a new concept integrating a user s geographic location with the general notion of services, such as dialing an emergency number from a cell phone or using a navigation system in a car. Incorporating both mobile communication and spatial data, these applications represent a novel challenge both conceptually and technically.
The purpose of this book is to describe, in an accessible fashion, the various concepts underlying mobile location-based services. These range from general application-related ideas to technical aspects. Each chapter starts with a high level of abstraction and drills down to the technical details. Contributors examine each application from all necessary perspectives, namely, requirements, services, data, and scalability. An illustrative example begins early in the book and runs throughout, serving as a reference.
. This book defines the LBS field and identifies its capabilities, challenges, and technologies.
. The contributors are recognized experts from academia and industry.
. Coverage includes navigation systems, middleware, interoperability, standards, and mobile communications.
. A sample application, the "find-friend" application, is used throughout the book to integrate the concepts discussed in each chapter."

Intelligent systems are now being used more commonly than in the past. These involve cognitive, evolving and artificial-life, robotic, and decision making systems, to name a few. Due to the tremendous speed of development, on both fundamental and technological levels, it is virtually impossible to offer an up-to-date, yet comprehensive overview of this field. Nevertheless, the need for a volume presenting recent developments and trends in this domain is huge, and the demand for such a volume is continually increasing in industrial and academic engineering 1 communities. Although there are a few volumes devoted to similar issues, none offer a comprehensive coverage of the field; moreover they risk rapidly becoming obsolete. The editors of this volume cannot pretend to fill such a large gap. However, it is the editors' intention to fill a significant part of this gap. A comprehensive coverage of the field should include topics such as neural networks, fuzzy systems, neuro-fuzzy systems, genetic algorithms, evolvable hardware, cellular automata-based systems, and various types of artificial life-system implementations, including autonomous robots. In this volume, we have focused on the first five topics listed above. The volume is composed of four parts, each part being divided into chapters, with the exception of part 4. In Part 1, the topics of "Evolvable Hardware and GAs" are addressed. In Chapter 1, "Automated Design Synthesis and Partitioning for Adaptive Reconfigurable Hardware," Ranga Vemuri and co-authors present state-of-the-art adaptive architectures, their classification, and their applications."

Written by an exponent of systems engineering, this is a comprehensive examination of systems thinking and methods, demonstrating how to use the ideas to create and manage more effective engineering systems. Using this resource, engineers should be able to apply systems thinking to the design, implementation and management of engineering systems.

Cryptography in Chinese consists of two characters meaning "secret coded." Thanks to Ch'in Chiu-Shao and his successors, the Chinese Remainder Theorem became a cornerstone of public key cryptography. Today, as we observe the constant usage of high-speed computers interconnected via the Internet, we realize that cryptography and its related applications have developed far beyond "secret coding." China, which is rapidly developing in all areas of technology, is also writing a new page of history in cryptography. As more and more Chinese become recognized as leading researchers in a variety of topics in cryptography, it is not surprising that many of them are Professor Xiao's former students.

Progress on Cryptography: 25 Years of Cryptography in China is a compilation of papers presented at an international workshop in conjunction with the ChinaCrypt, 2004. After 20 years, the research interests of the group have extended to a variety of areas in cryptography. This edited volume includes 32 contributed chapters. The material will cover a range of topics, from mathematical results of cryptography to practical applications. This book also includes a sample of research, conducted by Professor Xiao's former and current students.

Progress on Cryptography: 25 Years of Cryptography in China is designed for a professional audience, composed of researchers and practitioners in industry. This book is also suitable as a secondary text for graduate-level students in computer science, mathematics and engineering.

The primary objective of this book is to teach the architectures, design principles, and troubleshooting techniques of a LAN. This will be imparted through the presentation of a broad scope of data and computer communication standards, real-world inter-networking techniques, architectures, hardware, software, protocols, technologies and services as they relate to the design, implementation and troubleshooting of a LAN. The logical and physical design of hardware and software is not the only process involved in the design and implementation of a LAN. The latter also encompasses many other aspects including making the business case, compiling the requirements, choosing the technology, planning for capacity, selecting the vendor, and weighing all the issues before the actual design begins.

Data warehouses have captured the attention of practitioners and researchers alike. But the design and optimization of data warehouses remains an art rather than a science. This book presents the first comparative review of the state of the art and best current practice of data warehouses. It covers source and data integration, multidimensional aggregation, query optimization, update propagation, metadata management, quality assessment, and design optimization. Also, based on results of the European Data Warehouse Quality project, it offers a conceptual framework by which the architecture and quality of data warehouse efforts can be assessed and improved using enriched metadata management combined with advanced techniques from databases, business modeling, and artificial intelligence. For researchers and database professionals in academia and industry, the book offers an excellent introduction to the issues of quality and metadata usage in the context of data warehouses.

An accessible theoretical analysis of the organizational impact of information technologies. This book examines the many ways in which actors, organizations and technologies are represented through these technologies thus bridging the gap between the abstractions of current theories of organization and the somewhat excessively grounded material on information systems.

The purpose of the 4th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS) was to bring together researchers, engineers and practitioners interested in the advances and business applications of information systems. The research papers focused on real world applications covering four main themes: Enterprise Database Applications, Artificial Intelligence Applications and Decision Support Systems, Systems Analysis and Specification, and Internet and Electronic Commerce.
This book will be of interest to information technology professionals, especially those working on systems integration, databases, decision support systems or electronic commerce. It will also be of use to middle managers who need to work with information systems and require knowledge of current trends in development methods and applications.

Quantum Communication, Quantum Networks, and Quantum Sensing represents a self-contained introduction to quantum communication, quantum error-correction, quantum networks, and quantum sensing. It starts with basic concepts from classical detection theory, information theory, and channel coding fundamentals before continuing with basic principles of quantum mechanics including state vectors, operators, density operators, measurements, and dynamics of a quantum system. It continues with fundamental principles of quantum information processing, basic quantum gates, no-cloning and theorem on indistinguishability of arbitrary quantum states. The book then focuses on quantum information theory, quantum detection and Gaussian quantum information theories, and quantum key distribution (QKD). The book then covers quantum error correction codes (QECCs) before introducing quantum networks. The book concludes with quantum sensing and quantum radars, quantum machine learning and fault-tolerant quantum error correction concepts.

In this volume organizational learning theory is used to analyse various practices of managing and facilitating knowledge sharing within companies. Experiences with three types of knowledge sharing, namely knowledge acquisition, knowledge reuse, and knowledge creation, at ten large companies are discussed and analyzed. This critical analysis leads to the identification of traps and obstacles when managing knowledge sharing, when supporting knowledge sharing with IT tools, and when organizations try to learn from knowledge sharing practices. The identification of these risks is followed by a discussion of how organizations can avoid them.

This work will be of interest to researchers and practitioners working in organization science and business administration. Also, consultants and organizations at large will find the book useful as it will provide them with insights into how other organizations manage and facilitate knowledge sharing and how potential failures can be prevented.

The terms groupware and CSCW (Computer-Supported Cooperative Work) have received significant attention in computer science and related disciplines for quite some time now. This book has two main objectives: first, to outline the meaning of both terms, and second, to point out both the numerous opportunities for users of CSCW systems and the risks of applying them. The book introduces in detail an interdisciplinary application area of distributed systems, namely the computer support of individuals trying to solve a problem in cooperation with each other but not necessarily having identical work places or working times. CSCW can be viewed as a synergism between the areas of distributed systems and (multimedia) communications on the one hand and those of information science and socio-organizational theory on the other hand. Thus, the book is addressed to students of all these disciplines, as well as to users and developers of systems with group communication and cooperation as top priorities.

The new organizational paradigms of global cooperation and collaboration require new ways and means for their support. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) can and will play a significant role in this support. However, the many currently available and seemingly conflicting solutions, the confusing terminology, the lack of business justification, and last but not least the insufficient understanding of the technology by the end user community has significantly hampered the large scale application of the relevant ICT support and thereby the acceptance of the new paradigms.

Many of these issues have been addressed in the workshops of the international initiative on Enterprise Inter- and Intra-Organizational Integration, which has been supported by the European IST Programme and NIST. The main subjects of the initiative: relations between knowledge management and business process modeling, interoperability of business processes and process models, enterprise engineering and integration, and representation of process models. Ontologies and agent technologies - the latter with their relations to ontologies and models - have been further subjects of discussions in several workshops.

Results of the initiative are reported in this volume, which comprises the proceedings of the International Conference on Enterprise Integration and Modeling Technology (ICEIMT'02). The conference was sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and held in Valencia, Spain in April 2002.

Enterprise Inter- and Intra-Organizational Integration: Building International Consensus provides not only a wealth of information on the state of the art of the subjects of theinitiative, it also identifies opportunities for research and development. Potential projects are identified in the work group reports and some of those will be taken up by organizations involved.

Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) Systems Architecture and Design gives a jump-start to engineers developing O-RAN hardware and software systems, providing a top-down approach to O-RAN systems design. It gives an introduction into why wireless systems look the way they do today before introducing relevant O-RAN and 3GPP standards. The remainder of the book discusses hardware and software aspects of O-RAN system design, including dimensioning and performance targets.

The information infrastructure---comprising computers, embedded devices, networks and software systems---is vital to day-to-day operations in every sector: information and telecommunications, banking and finance, energy, chemicals and hazardous materials, agriculture, food, water, public health, emergency services, transportation, postal and shipping, government and defense. Global business and industry, governments, indeed society itself, cannot function effectively if major components of the critical information infrastructure are degraded, disabled or destroyed. Critical Infrastructure Protection describes original research results and innovative applications in the interdisciplinary field of critical infrastructure protection. Also, it highlights the importance of weaving science, technology and policy in crafting sophisticated, yet practical, solutions that will help secure information, computer and network assets in the various critical infrastructure sectors. Areas of coverage include: - Themes and Issues - Infrastructure Security - Control Systems Security - Network Infrastructure Security - Infrastructure Interdependencies - Risk Assessment This book is the first volume in the annual series produced by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Working Group 11.10 on Critical Infrastructure Protection, an international community of scientists, engineers, practitioners and policy makers dedicated to advancing research, development and implementation efforts focused on infrastructure protection. The book contains a selection of twenty-seven edited papers from the First Annual IFIP WG 11.10 International Conference onCritical Infrastructure Protection, held at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, USA in the spring of 2007. Critical Infrastructure Protection is an important resource for researchers, faculty members and graduate students, as well as for policy makers, practitioners and other individuals with interests in homeland security. Eric Goetz is the Associate Director for Research at the Institute for Information Infrastructure Protection, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, USA. Sujeet Shenoi is the F.P. Walter Professor of Computer Science and a principal with the Center for Information Security at the University of Tulsa, Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA.

Information Systems: The e-Business Challenge Indisputable, e-Business is shaping the future inspiring a growing range of innovative business models. To bring it to the point: the Internet has redefined the way electronic business is performed. In an electronic supported business all relationships are transformed -may it be a seller-to buyer relationship or a an agency-to-citizen relationship. So for instance in commerce new business models incorporate various activities: promoting and communicating company and product information to a global user base; accepting orders and payments for goods and services; providing ongoing customer support; getting feedback and spurring collaboration for a new product development. There are several ways of further differentiating e-Business such as sketching some diversions on various levels: e-Commerce, e-Government; B2C, B2B, B2G, G2C; Customer Relationship Management, Business Intelligence and so on. Further distinctions may follow divergent criteria such as separating in business stages. Thus particular problem domains emerge. They all state of its own guiding the development of adequate information systems."

A compact guide to knowledge management, this book makes the subject accessible without oversimplifying it. Organizational issues like strategy and culture are discussed in the context of typical knowledge management processes. The focus is always on pointing out all the issues that need to be taken into account in order to make knowledge management a success. The book then goes on to explore the role of information technology as an enabler of knowledge management relating various technologies to the knowledge management processes, showing the reader what can, and what cannot, be achieved through technology. Throughout the book, references to lessons learned from past projects underline the arguments. Managers will find this book a valuable guide for implementing their own initiatives, while researchers and system designers will find plenty of ideas for future work.