Stigmergic Hyperlink

Inspired by patterns of behavior generated in social networks, a prototype of a new object was designed and developed for the World Wide Web – the stigmergic hyperlink or “stigh”. In a system of stighs, like a Web page, the objects that users do use grow “healthier”, while the unused “weaken”, eventually to the extreme of their “death”, being autopoieticaly replaced by new destinations. At the single Web page scale, these systems perform like recommendation systems and embody an “ecological” treatment to unappreciated links. On the much wider scale of generalized usage, because each stigh has a method to retrieve information about its destination, Web agents in general and search engines in particular, would have the option to delegate the crawling and/or the parsing of the destination. This would be an interesting social change: after becoming not only consumers, but also content producers, Web users would, just by hosting (automatic) stighs, become information service providers too.

Technology Acceptance Model and Determinants of Technology Rejection

Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) is an important tool to understand the dynamics of acceptance of Information Systems in an organization. The model posits that perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness are key factors in the adoption. This study extends TAM for investigating the user rejection of technology by reversing the two key factors into perceived difficulty of use and perceived uselessness. The study was conducted by surveying the customers of an e-banking application in Turkey who disuse the system. The results reveal important hints for the organization that wants to get an insight into the causes of the system disuse.

Creating a Personalized Artificial Intelligence Course

This paper illustrates the use of WELSA adaptive educational system for the implementation of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) course which is individualized to the learning style of each student. Several of the issues addressed throughout this paper are describing similar approaches existing in literature, how the AI course is created, and what kind of personalization is provided in the course including the underlying adaptation mechanism. The authors also focus on whether the course is used effectively by the stakeholders (teachers and students respectively). Results obtained in the paper confirm the practical applicability of WELSA and its potential for meeting the personalization needs and expectations of the digital native students.

Exploring Barriers to Coordination between Humanitarian NGOs

Humanitarian nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are increasingly collaborating through inter-organizational structures such as coalitions, alliances, partnerships, and coordination bodies. NGO’s information technology coordination bodies are groups of NGOs aimed at improving the efficiency of ICT use in humanitarian assistance through greater coordination. Despite their popularity, little is known about these coordination bodies, specifically the extent to which they address inter-organizational coordination problems. This paper examines coordination problems within two humanitarian NGO’s information technology coordination bodies. Based on data collected through interviews, observation, and document analysis, despite positive attitudes toward coordination by members, seven of eight widely accepted barriers to coordination still exist among members of these coordination bodies. Further, in a comparison of mandate-oriented, structural and behavioral coordination barriers, research finds mandate issues were most significant and structural factors were found in the greatest numbers. Findings suggest that effective humanitarian NGO’s information technology coordination bodies must pay attention to both organizational design and management issues, although the former are likely to have a greater impact on coordination.

Global Teacher Training Based on a Multiple Perspective Assessment

The main objective of this project is to design and implement Web-based collaborative environments for a global training based on a multiple perspective assessment for future and novice ALTs (Assistant Language Teachers) who will come to Japan from various parts of the world. The system was created in order to give better chances to acquire professional knowledge in advance with support from experienced senior teachers, both Japanese teachers and former ALTs. Computer Support for Collaborative Learning (CSCL) was adopted as a platform for their online discussion with much focus on multiple perspective assessment to support social and personalized aspects such as individual accountability and contribution to the collaboration. Initial results are reported using the analysis of system design and the Web-based questionnaire answered by the participants involved in this knowledge-building forum.

Actability Criteria for Design and Evaluation

Information systems actability theory builds on a communicative action perspective on IS. Information systems are seen as instruments for technology mediated work communication. Human actors are communicating (i.e. sending and/or receiving messages) through an information system. Information systems actability emphasises pragmatic dimensions of information systems. The paper presents 19 actability criteria divided into three groups: 1) criteria concerning user-system interaction, 2) criteria concerning user-through-system-to-user communication, and 3) criteria concerning information system’s contribution to workpractice processes. These actability criteria should be possible to use in design and evaluation of information systems.

A Broken Supply and Social Chain

There was a time in the history of GM when it was the largest corporation in the US. The history of GM also shows that it was the single largest employer in the world. The announcement of GM’s bankruptcy on June 1, 2009 shocked the world and had a tremendous impact on the United States economy. Looking back at the history of GM, there were many indicators which suggested the fate of the company. There were several internal factors that answer the question, what went wrong with GM. These internal factors are management arrogance, not meeting customer demands, the costs and demands of unions, poor forecasting, and internal controls on accounting standards. Similarly, there were several external factors that answer the same question, which include increased competition and loss of market share, rising gas prices and environmental friendliness, and the costs and burdens of meeting government regulations and restrictions. This paper will explore and answer the following questions: What are the fundamental causes of GM’s problems? What can be learned from GM’s mistakes and experiences? How and why an industrial icon came to ruin?

Scale Economies in Indian Commercial Banking Sector

Two alternative estimation models, i.e., a translog cost function and data envelopment analysis (DEA) based on a cost model are compared and contrasted in revealing scale economies in the Indian commercial banking sector. The empirical results indicate that while the translog cost model exhibits increasing returns to scale for all the ownership groups, the DEA model reveals economies of scale only for foreign banks, diseconomies of scale for nationalized banks, and both economies and diseconomies of scale for private banks. The divergence of the results obtained from these two estimation models should concern model builders. From an empirical perspective the definition of scale economies through a constant input mix is very restrictive. The DEA cost model is much more flexible in this respect: It neither requires the restrictive assumptions that the unit factor prices are always available with certainty, nor that these prices are exogenous to the firms. However, the very volatile nature of the banking industry might question the validity of the empirical estimates in this deterministic setting. Therefore, further research is required to examine the bank performance behavior using both SFA and chance constrained DEA for the comparison in a stochastic setting.

Collective Construction of Meaning and System for an Inclusive Social Network

Information and Communication Technology has the potential of benefiting citizens, allowing access to knowledge, communication and collaboration, and thus promoting the process of constitution of a fairer society. The design of systems that make sense to the users’ community and that respect their diversity demands socio-technical views and an in-depth analysis of the involved parties. The authors have adopted Organizational Semiotics and Participatory Design as theoretical and methodological frames of reference to face this challenge in the design of an Inclusive Social Network System for the Brazilian context. This paper presents the use of some artifacts adapted from Problem Articulation Method to clarify concepts and prospect solutions. Results of this clarification fed the Semantic Analysis Method from which this paper presents and discusses an Ontology Chart for the domain and the first signs of the inclusive social network system.

A Query-Based Approach for Semi-Automatic Annotation of Web Services

Semantic Web services (SWS) have attracted increasing attention due to their potential to automate discovery and composition of current syntactic Web services. An issue that prevents a wider adoption of SWS relates to the manual nature of the semantic annotation task. Manual annotation is a difficult, error-prone, and time-consuming process and automating the process is highly desirable. Though some approaches have been proposed to semi-automate the annotation task, they are difficult to use and cannot perform accurate annotation for the following reasons: (1) They require building application ontologies to represent candidate services and (2) they cannot perform accurate name-based matching when labels of candidate service elements and ontological entities contain Compound Nouns (CN). To overcome these two deficiencies, this paper proposes a query-based approach that can facilitate semi-automatic annotation of Web services. The proposed approach is easy to use because it does not require building application ontologies to represent services. Candidate service elements that need to be annotated are extracted from a WSDL file and used to generate query instances by filling a Standard Query Template. The resulting query instances are executed against a repository of ontologies using a novel query execution engine to find appropriate correspondences for candidate service elements. This query execution engine employs name-based and structural matching mechanisms that can perform effective and accurate similarity measurements between labels containing CNs. The proposed semi-automatic annotation approach is evaluated by employing it to annotate existing Web services using published domain ontologies. Precision and recall are used as evaluation metrics. The resulting precision and recall values demonstrate the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed approach.