Integrating Web Portals with Semantic Web Services

Several systems integration proposals have been suggested over the years. However these proposals have mainly focused on data integration, not allowing users to take advantage of services offered by Web portals. Most of the mentioned proposals only provide a set of design principles to build integrated systems and lack in suggesting a systematic way of how to develop systems based on the integration architecture they propose. In previous work we have developed PISA (Web Portal Integration Architecture)—a Web portal integration architecture for data and services—and MIDAS-S, a methodological approach for the development of integrated Web portals, built according to PISA. This work shows, by means of a case study, how both proposals fit together integrating Web portals.

Drivers of Organizational Participation in XML-Based Industry Standardization Efforts

XML-based vertical standards are an emerging compatibility standard for describing business processes and data formats in specific industries that have emerged in the past decade. Vertical standards, typically implemented using eXtensible Markup Language (XML), are incomplete products in constant evolution, continually adding functionality to reflect changing business needs. Vertical standards are public goods because they are freely obtained from sponsoring organizations without investing resources in their development, which gives rise to linked collective action dilemmas at the development and diffusion stages. Firms must be persuaded to invest in development without being able to profit from the output, and a commitment to ensure the diffusion of the standard must be secured from enough potential adopters to guarantee success. In this paper, the authors explore organizational drivers for participation in vertical standards development activities for supply- and demand-side organizations (i.e., vendors and end-user firms) in light of the restrictions imposed by these dilemmas.

A Good Role Model for Ontologies

Although ontologies are gaining more and more acceptance, they are often not engineered in a component-based manner due to, among various reasons, a lack of appropriate constructs in current ontology languages. This hampers reuse and makes creating new ontologies from existing building blocks difficult. We propose to apply the notion of roles and role modeling to ontologies and present an extension of the Web Ontology Language OWL for this purpose. Ontological role models allow for clearly separating different concerns of a domain and constitute an intuitive reuse unit.

The Core Critical Success Factors in Implementation of Enterprise Resource Planning Systems

The Implementation of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems require huge investments while ineffective implementations of such projects are commonly observed. A considerable number of these projects have been reported to fail or take longer than it was initially planned, while previous studies show that the aim of rapid implementation of such projects has not been successful and the failure of the fundamental goals in these projects have imposed huge amounts of costs on investors. Some of the major consequences are the reduction in demand for such products and the introduction of further skepticism to the managers and investors of ERP systems. In this regard, it is important to understand the factors determining success or failure of ERP implementation. The aim of this paper is to study the critical success factors (CSFs) in implementing ERP systems and to develop a conceptual model which can serve as a basis for ERP project managers. These critical success factors that are called “core critical success factors” are extracted from 62 published papers using the content analysis and the entropy method. The proposed conceptual model has been verified in the context of five multinational companies.

Factors that Determine the Adoption of Cloud Computing

Cloud computing has spread within enterprise faster than many other IT innovations. In cloud computing, computer services are accessed over the Internet in a scalable fashion, where the user is abstracted in varying degrees from the actual hardware and software and pays only for resources used. This paper examines the adoption of cloud computing in various regions of the world, as well as the potential of cloud computing to impact computing in developing countries. The authors propose that cloud computing offers varying benefits and appears differently in regions across the world, enabling many users to obtain sophisticated computing architectures and applications that are cost-prohibitive to acquire locally. The authors examine issues of privacy, security, and reliability of cloud computing and discuss the outlook for firms and individuals in both developing and developed countries seeking to utilize cloud computing for their computing needs.

Message-Based Approach to Master Data Synchronization among Autonomous Information Systems

The evolution of networks and large scale information systems has led to the rise of data sources that are distributed, heterogeneous, and autonomous. As a result, the management of Master Data becomes more complex and of uncertain quality. This paper presents a novel message-based approach to the synchronization of Master Data among multiple autonomous information systems. Different than traditional approaches based on database triggers, the author adopts the optimistic bidirectional strategy with the process of two synchronization phases. By means of data service buses, it propagates synchronized Master Data through messages being passed along star-like cascading routes. Moreover, this approach could resolve possible data conflicts automatically using predefined attribute confidences and deducible current value confidences respectively. Finally, this paper presents the real case about synchronizing datasets among four separate but related systems based on the author’s novel message-based approach.

Evaluating Information Systems

In the past decade, the rush to technology has created several flaws in terms of managing computers, applications, and middleware and information systems. Therefore, organizations struggle to understand how these elements behave. Even today, as Enterprise Architectures grow in significance and are acknowledged as advantageous artifacts to help manage change, their benefit to the organization has yet to be fully explored. In this paper, the authors focus on the challenge of real-time information systems evaluation, using the enterprise architecture as a boundary object and a base for communication. The solution proposed is comprised of five major steps: establishing a strong conceptual base on the evaluation of information systems, defining a high level language for this activity, extending an architecture creation pipeline, creating a framework that automates it, and the framework’s implementation. The conceptual framework proposed avoids imprecise definitions of quality and quality attributes, was materialized in a model-eval-display loop framework, and was implemented using Model Driven Software Development practices and tools. Finally, a prototype is applied to a real-world scenario to verify the conceptual solution in practice.

Extending the Technology Acceptance Model to Investigate the Utilization of ERP Systems

The implementation of Enterprise Recourse Planning (ERP) systems has grown rapidly, but limited research has been conducted to investigate the utilization of ERP systems. By extending the Technology Acceptance Model, this paper provides a research model for examining the impact of computer self-efficacy and ERP systems design features on the utilization of ERP systems. To test the proposed research model, data are collected through a questionnaire survey distributed among employees in different organizations that have implemented an ERP system in the United Arab Emirates. Structural equation modeling techniques are used in this study to verify the causal relationships between the variables. The results strongly support the extended TAM in understanding employees’ utilization of ERP systems. The implications of this study and further research opportunities are also discussed.

Toward UML-Compliant Semantic Web Services Development

The emerging Semantic Web and, in particular, Semantic Web services (SWS), demands the inclusion of new components in applications involving this technology. Therefore, Web development methodologies must be tailored to support the systematic development of such new components. In previous works we presented a UML profile, which extends the SOD-M method for service oriented Web Information System development of the MIDAS model-driven framework, to address the development of Semantic Web Services using WSMO (Web Service Modeling Ontology). The UML profile allows for the modeling of the new elements required by WSMO Web Services. This paper focuses on studying the possibility of improving the proposed UML profile, including the OCL (Object Constraint Language), for the representation of WSMO logical axioms through three case studies. This would allow developers, whose knowledge does not extend beyond UML, to develop applications that use Semantic Web services.

An Empirical Evaluation of the Assimilation of Industry-Specific Data Standards Using Firm-Level and Community-Level Constructs

Vertical standards focus on industry-specific product and service descriptions, and are generally implemented using the eXtensible Markup Language (XML). Vertical standards are complex technologies with an organizational adoption locus but subject to inter-organizational dependence and network effects. Understanding the assimilation process for vertical standards requires that both firm and industry-level effects be considered simultaneously. In this paper, the authors develop and evaluate a two-level model of organizational assimilation that includes both firm and industry-level effects. The study was conducted in collaboration with OASIS, a leading cross-industry standards-development organization (SDO), and with ACORD, the principal SDO for the insurance and financial services industries. Results confirm the usefulness of incorporating firm-level and community-level constructs in the study of complex networked technologies. Specifically, the authors’ re-conceptualization of the classical DoI concepts of relative advantage and complexity are shown to be appropriate and significant in predicting vertical standards assimilation. Additionally, community-level constructs such as orphaning risk and standard legitimation are also shown to be important predictors of assimilation.