32334665
An Empirical Study of Standards Development for E-Businesses: A Social Network Perspective
Research on the nature of e-business standards and the organizational context in which they are developed has received little attention in the literature of IT standards and standardization. This study investigates communication patterns in online standards groups to provide insights into the nature of group dynamics among standards decision makers and its relation to the standards context. Email data is used from the ebXML standards initiative. Findings suggest that standards groups operating on the Internet appear to form a cohesive structure, despite the fact that they tend to consist of large group of participants coming from various backgrounds and industries, while their communication patterns are influenced by standards orientation. Policy implications for managers in online standards groups are presented.
14865238
Adopting ontology to facilitate knowledge sharing
Ontology-enabled knowledge management experiences derived from a domain ontology development project at Intel Corporation are described and assessed.
30747196
Addressing a standards creation process: a focus on ebXML
Current trends in e-business are creating opportunities for automation of business processes across business boundaries. However, lack of standards has caused difficulties for industry players in exploiting resources and coordinating activities in the context of e-business. ebXML--an emerging e-business standard framework to unite competing factions under a banner of international trade--has been developed within an industry consortium using an open, collaborative process with no barriers to entry, whose approach is very different from traditional approach to create standards. Drawing on socio-technological perspective, this paper attempts to gain deeper understanding of such phenomenon by using a case study methodology. This paper uses data drawn mostly from email discussions and minutes of teleconference and face-to-face meeting. Our exploration of the ebXML standardization process generates specific propositions. In summary, our analysis found that the 'openness' of standardization process helps to create a more comprehensive standard than proprietary standards--effectively leading to convergence of technologies, and that the unfolding dynamics of standardization process varies depending on the characteristics of standards to be developed. We also discuss user participation as an important factor that influences the dynamics of standardization process in such an open, collaborative standardization process. Surprisingly, user participation seems to be more effective in creating technical infrastructure oriented standards rather than business process oriented standards.
11850990
Network Traffic Reduction by Hypertext Compression
This paper proposes a three-step process to reduce the size of hypertext documents for reducing the network traffic on the Internet. With the explosive growth in the number of users on the Internet, the bandwidth demand has grown tremendously. Before the improvement of network infrastructures can meet the demand, this paper addresses the problem by reducing the size of HTML documents that currently occupies majority of the network traffic on the Internet. The proposed process consists of three steps: (1) shrinking HTML documents by removing data that will not alter the appearance and the function, (2) encoding HTML documents by representing most frequent used tags and words with single bytes, and (3) compressing HTML documents by using standard compression utilities. Our test results show that the proposed process achieves a reduction ratio of 81% on average. We also developed a browser plug-in program that provides transparent access for the users when viewing the reduced-size HTML documents. With the plug-in program, the users will not see any differences when viewing the reduced-sized HTML documents comparing to the original ones. They will, however, experience a reduction in retrieval latency on average of 15%.
8402297
The Effects of Users' Motivation on their Perception to Trading Systems of Digital Content Accessories: Focusing on Trading Items in Online Games
As the market for digital content accessories grows, motivation for trading digital content accessories has significant effects on their fun, transaction cost, and intention to trade and use digital contents. However, few empirical studies have investigated users' perception of trading digital content accessories. The main purpose of this study is to construct and verify a research model identifying the relationships among the attributes of transaction, users' perceived fun and transaction cost, and the intention to trade and use digital contents, all of which are modulated by users' motivation. The research model was constructed based on transaction cost theory and motivational theory. An experiment in a real massive multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG) environment was conducted and the results indicate that users' different motivations have effects on their perception to digital content accessories trading systems, intention to use those systems, and intention to use digital contents
6530554
Adaptive Index Utilization in Memory-Resident Structural Joins
We consider adaptive index utilization as a fine-grained problem in autonomic databases in which an existing index is dynamically determined to be used or not in query processing. As a special case, we study this problem for structural joins, the core operator in XML query processing, in the main memory. We find that index utilization is beneficial for structural joins only under certain join selectivity and distribution of matching elements. Therefore, we propose adaptive algorithms to decide whether to use an index probe or a data scan for each step of matching during the processing of a structural join operator. Our adaptive algorithms are based on the history, the look-ahead information, or both. We have developed a cost model to facilitate this adaptation and have conducted experiments with both synthetic and real-world data sets. Our results show that adaptively utilizing indexes in a structural join improves the performance by taking advantage of both sequential scans and index probes.
13929475
Effects of Web retail service quality and product categories on consumer behavior: a research model and empirical exploration
This paper explores how Web retail service quality at the point of purchase influences consumers' perceptions of value and willingness to buy. In particular, this study highlights how Web retail service quality has different effects on perceived product quality, value, and willingness to buy according to product categories. We provide a research model on the basis of service quality, product categories on the Web, and marketing theories for consumers' purchase behavior. Consumer perceptions of Web retail service quality are collected from a sample of shoppers who actively search for products over the Internet. The results imply that functional Web retail service quality has a direct effect on willingness to buy and technical Web retail service quality influences consumer perceptions of product quality and value. Furthermore, product categories moderate the relationships among Web retail service quality, perceived product quality, perceived value, and willingness to buy. Implications for Internet marketing and future research directions are discussed.
10012054
A development environment for customer-oriented Internet business: eBizBench
Abstract An important challenge in the age of Internet business is the proper alignment of customers’ needs with the business system. In order to improve an Internet business system according to customers’ needs continuously, reuse of design results is of particular importance. This paper proposes a development environment, called eBizBench, which provides support for this alignment and reusability. The eBizBench includes seven functions: (1) project management, (2) customer analysis, (3) value analysis, (4) web design, (5) implementation design, (6) repository management, and (7) repository. The eBizBench can help develop and maintain Internet business systems in a systematic fashion. The repository is useful for the conversion of design results among development environments. A real-life web site is illustrated to demonstrate the usefulness of the eBizBench.