Online Payment via PayPal API Case Study Event Registration Management System (ERMS)

PayPal is an international payment gateway allowing businesses and individuals to transfer funds in a secure manner over the Internet. Using PayPal to accept payments has several advantages for online merchants. It is a recognized brand when it comes to Business to Consumer (B2C) transactions, creating a business account with PayPal is easier and faster, and finally, PayPal lends its name to the transaction, so customers may feel more comfortable entering into a transaction with a previously unknown merchant. Besides the mentioned advantages, PayPal’s transaction dispute system requires a tracking number from a shipped package to respond to a customer dispute. If the product is purely electronic (a download or access to a site, for example), one’s response to disputes will be quite limited. The solution for the problem mentioned above is PayPal API. The PayPal API resolves Pay Pal drawback through maintaining card and bank account payment schedules without the liability of warehousing payment data also processing one-time and recurring payments. For the evaluation of Pay Pal API, the authors develop an Event Registration Management System (ERMS). ERMS serves as a platform for users to make registrations for events such as conferences, seminars, and workshops.

Adaptive Ontology-Based Web Information Retrieval

Finding relevant information on the Web is difficult for most users. Although Web search applications are improving, they must be more “intelligent” to adapt to the search domains targeted by queries, the evolution of these domains, and users’ characteristics. In this paper, the authors present the TARGET framework for Web Information Retrieval. The proposed approach relies on the use of ontologies of a particular nature, called adaptive ontologies, for representing both the search domain and a user’s profile. Unlike existing approaches on ontologies, the authors make adaptive ontologies adapt semi-automatically to the evolution of the modeled domain. The ontologies and their properties are exploited for domain specific Web search purposes. The authors propose graph-based data structures for enriching Web data in semantics, as well as define an automatic query expansion technique to adapt a query to users’ real needs. The enriched query is evaluated on the previously defined graph-based data structures representing a set of Web pages returned by a usual search engine in order to extract the most relevant information according to user needs. The overall TARGET framework is formalized using first-order logic and fully tool supported.

A Semiotic-Based Approach for Search in Social Network Services

Search mechanisms in Social Network Services (SNSs) should take into account the meanings created, shared, and used by people through the use of the system. This paper investigates a new approach to develop search mechanisms more adequate for SNSs. SNSs represent an opportunity for people access to information in the Web. These systems allow individuals to constitute communities of common interests with wide cultural diversity, sharing information and vocabularies. The search mechanism proposed in this paper is grounded in Semantic Web technologies combined and articulated with Organizational Semiotics methods and artifacts. The authors illustrate a process to create the ontology and techniques to improve semantic search results in SNSs using Semantic Web Rule Language. The paper discusses the practical and technological results that could be achieved using the proposed approach.

A SOA-Based Environment Supporting Collaborative Experiments in E-Science

Many sophisticated environments allow creating and managing of scientific workflows, whereas the workflow itself is provided as a service. Scientific Grids handle large amounts of data and share resources, but the implementation of service-based applications that use scientific infrastructures remains a challenging task, due to the heterogeneity of Grid middleware and different programming models. This paper proposes an e-Science environment providing functionality in a simplified way, considering the Grid as a source of computational power and an information infrastructure. To promote integration among components and user interaction, the paper outlines a SOA-based scientific environment where an experiment is modeled through an abstract workflow defining the functional model of the experiment. The tasks are mapped to the corresponding scientific services by a workflow engine, separating logical aspects from implementation issues. Services depend on the type of experiment and can be re-used, wrapped, or moved into a new workflow. Infrastructural services discover suitable resources that match user requirements and schedule workflow tasks. Further, they monitor the execution of each task and aggregate the results. The proposed approach provides a simple-to-use and standardized way for the deployment of scientific workflows in a distributed scientific environment, including the Grid.

Ontology Mapping Validation

The use of ontologies and ontology mappings is increasing in companies. Often the same context is modeled in different ontologies. Mapping is necessary to integrate these ontologies; however, in many cases these mappings are incorrect, i.e., they incorrectly link semantic concepts with different meanings. Tools that validate these mappings are necessary to ensure reliable communication between heterogeneous systems. This validation cannot be done in a completely automatic way, because the mappings are based on human interpretation. This work describes a semi-automatic tool that supports this activity, based on graphs that generate instances validated in a semi-automatic process that aims to ensure mapping robustness. This algorithm deals with an NP-Complete problem in order to generate all the instances. This paper presents a first prototype of the tool and the methodology used to validate the instances automatically generated by the tool.

An Initial Examination of Free and Proprietary Software-Selection in Organizations

This article presents the findings of a study concerning organisational software-selection in the context of proprietary and “Free Software”. Proprietary software with its inherent benefits and drawbacks remains dominant over Free Software in many business contexts. In contrast, the arrival of disruptive approaches to applying technology, such as cloud-computing, almost certainly mandates a heterogeneous software environment. However, this paper abstracts to the organisational context, as opposed to solely concentrating on the technical aspects, so that broader issues surrounding both proprietary software and Free Software adoption are brought into focus and may provide academics and practitioners with insight into what many would consider an information technology-centric matter. Contemporary multi-disciplinary literature addressing the areas of software-selection methodology, architectures for service delivery, and software types, are combined with recent findings from primary research in order to draw initial conclusions on the current state of software-selection in organisations.

Eidsvoll 1814

3D Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) or virtual worlds have been widely used in educational settings for the purposes of simulation and demonstration of scientific concepts, art and historical events that for practical reasons may be complicated in real-life classrooms. This paper describes an experience of recreating a central event in Norwegian history, adoption of Norwegian constitution at Eidsvoll in 1814, in the virtual world of Second Life. The historical building where this event took place was reconstructed and used as a part of an online history course where Norwegian students residing all over the world could meet at Virtual Eidsvoll, play the role of the members of the Constituent Assembly and pass the constitution. Following the description of the experience with the Virtual Eidsvoll project, the authors conclude with a critical discussion of using 3D CVEs for history education, outlining directions for future work.

Advanced Content Management System in Murdoch Research Institute

The Hugh Williamson Gait Analysis Laboratory is a world leader in the analysis of walking disorders in children. Using state of the art equipment, highly specialised staff are able to determine why children walk the way they do. Knowing this, it is then possible to plan treatment individually for each child. Gait Lab aims to make thorough and reliable measurements of children’s walking ability in an efficient and friendly manner. It provides considered interpretations of these measurements to referring clinicians and conducts research to advance the understanding of human walking. This paper introduces The Gait Analysis Laboratory Content Management System, a contemporary approach using a Content Management System for surgery and research alike. The system provides the ability for surgeons to edit data and extract specific reports for research using the Internet from any location and at any time. The CMS has the functionality to save patient details, create referrals and make appointments, information which can be used for specific reports, during the surgery process, and for research around the world.

A Reference Ontology Based Approach for Service Oriented Semantic Interoperability

To establish effective information exchange among applications in a distributed environment, participants not only share their functions and service interfaces, but often exchange data models. This paper proposes the use of ontologies to represent data models thus allowing applications to locate and integrate these models. A reference ontology based approach for service oriented ontology management is introduced. Specifically, a domain-specific reference ontology for use in the evaluation of a practical case is developed. To validate and evaluate the approach, a prototype system is developed to provide ontology deploying, browsing and mapping operations based on a service-oriented system. Experiments provide promising results that are consistent with the original ideas of managing ontologies and optimizing ontology mappings to facilitate data interoperability in a distributed environment.

Improving Collaborations in the Neuroscientist Community

In this paper, the authors present an approach called SATIS (Semantically AnnotaTed Intentions for Services), relying on intentional process modeling and semantic web technologies and models, assists collaboration among the members of the neurosciences community. The main expected result of this work is to derive and share semantic web service specifications from a neuroscientist’s point of view to operationalise image analysis pipelines with web services.