Intelligent Store Agent for Mobile Shopping

The conventional shopping process involves a human being visiting a designated store and perusing first the items available. A purchase decision is then made based on the information so gathered. However, a number of unique challenges a human shopper would face, if he/she prefers to execute this process using a mobile device, such as a phone. Taking this aspect into consideration, the authors propose the use of an Intelligent Agent for performing the Mobile Shopping on behalf of customers. In this situation, the agents gather information about the products through the use of ‘Store Coordinator Agents’ and then use them for comparing with the user preferences. The proposed agent based system is composed of two agents, viz., a User Agent and Store Coordinator Agent. The implementation of the scheme so proposed has been done using JADE-LEAP development kit and the performance results are discussed in the paper.

Protecting a Distributed Voting Schema for Anonymous and Secure Voting Against Attacks of Malicious Partners

A distributed protocol is presented for anonymous and secure voting that is failure-tolerant with respect to malicious behavior of individual participants and that does not rely on a trusted third party. The proposed voting protocol was designed to be executed on a fixed group of N known participants, each of them casting one vote that may be a vote for abstention. Several attack vectors on the protocol are presented, and the detection of malicious behavior like spying, suppressing, inventing, and modifying protocol messages or votes by the protocol is shown. If some participants stop the protocol, a fair information exchange is achieved in the sense that either all votes are guaranteed to be valid and accessible to all participants, or malicious behavior has been detected and the protocol is stopped, but the votes are not disclosed.

The WAVE Platform

The growth of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) offers governments advanced methods for providing services and governing their constituency. eGovernment research aims to provide the models, technologies, and tools for more effective and efficient public administration systems as well as more participatory decision processes. In particular, eParticipation opens up greater opportunities for consultation and dialogue between government and citizens. Many governments have embraced eParticipation by setting up websites that allow citizens to contribute and have their say on particular issues. Although these sites make use of some of the latest ICT and Web 2.0 technologies, the uptake and sustained usage by citizens is still relatively low. Additionally, when users do participate, there is the issue of how the numerous contributions can be effectively processed and analysed, to avoid the inevitable information overload created by thousands of unstructured comments. The WAVE platform addresses what the authors see as the main barriers to the uptake of eParticipation websites by adopting a holistic and sustained approach of engaging users to participate in public debates. The WAVE platform incorporates argument visualisation, social networking, and Web 2.0 techniques to facilitate users participating in structured visual debates in a community environment.

Policy Cycle-Based E-Government Architecture for Policy-Making Organisations of Public Administrations

This article outlines a business and application architecture for policy-making organisations of public administrations. The focus was placed on the derivation of processes and their IT support on the basis of the policy-cycle concept. The derivation of various (modular) process areas allows for the discussion of generic application support in order to achieve the modular structure of e-government architectures for policy-making organisations of public administrations, as opposed to architectures for operational administration processes by administrations. In addition, further issues and spheres of interest to be addressed in the field of architecture management for policy-making organisations of public administrations will be specified. Different architecture variants are evaluated in the context of a potential application of the architecture design for policy-making organisations of public administrations. This raises questions such as how the issue of interoperability between information systems of independent national, state, and municipal administrations is to be tackled. Further research is needed to establish, for example, the level of enterprise architecture and the depth to which integration in this area must or may extend.

Technical Audit of an Electronic Polling Station

This paper shows the lack of standard procedures to audit e-voting systems and also describes a practical process of auditing an e-voting experience based on a Direct-recording Electronic system (D.R.E). This system has been tested in a real situation, in the city council of Coahuila, Mexico, in November 2008. During the auditing, several things were kept in mind, in particular those critical in complex contexts, as democratic election processes are. The auditing process is divided into three main complementary stages: analysis of voting protocol, analysis of polling station hardware elements, and analysis of the software involved. Each stage contains several items which have to be analyzed at low level with the aim to detect and resolve possible security problems.

Colored vs. Black Screens or How Color Can Favor Green e-Commerce

This paper presents the results of an exploratory qualitative study conducted with 26 consumers about their use of computer screen savers. The results show how the use of screen savers remains almost nonexistent. Unknown or taking too long to apply, this feature is not attractive to persons interviewed who do not use it for sustainable development purposes. The paper presents the results of this qualitative study, offering an interpretive analysis of the reasons and factors explaining this type of computer user’s behavior. The paper also discusses the potential of using screensaver functionality in e-commerce websites, particularly in the Mediterranean region. In this direction it looks into how this could be provided by the establishment of two elements - a browser and a website extension, which will be tested in a future online experiment.

Measuring Interoperability Readiness in South Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean

This paper introduces the Interoperability Observatory, a structured research effort for measuring interoperability readiness in the regions of South Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean, supported by the Greek Interoperability Centre. The motivation for this effort derives from the fact that, although interoperability is a key element for public administration and enterprises effective operation, and an important enabler for cross-country cooperation, a standard framework for benchmarking interoperability developments at country level is currently not in place. Interoperability-related information is highly fragmented in different ICT, e-Government and e-Business reports. In this context, in the core of the Interoperability Observatory lies the definition of a structured collection of metrics and indicators, associated with the dimension of interoperability-governance, and a mechanism for gathering with regard to the latter suitable information for a number of countries from various sources. The ultimate goal is the use of this information towards the directions of raising awareness on the countries’ interoperability status, promoting best practice cases and benchmarking.

E-Service Research Trends in the Domain of E-Government

Government ‘e-service’ as a subfield of the e-government domain has been gaining attention to practitioners and academicians alike due to the growing use of information and communication technologies at the individual, organizational, and societal levels. This paper conducts a thorough literature review to examine the e-service research trends during the period between 2005 and 2009 mostly in terms of research methods, theoretical models, and frameworks employed as well as type of research questions. The results show that there has been a good amount of papers focusing on ‘e-Service’ within the field of e-government with a good combination of research methods and theories. In particular, findings show that technology acceptance, evaluation and system architecture are the most common themes, which circa half of the studies surveyed focus on the organizational perspective and that the most employed research methods are case studies and surveys, often with a mix of both types of methodologies.

Information Technology and Supply Chain Management Coordination

Logistics Service Providers (3PL) have become important players in supply chain management. In a highly competitive context characterized by “time compression”, a successful strategy depends increasingly on the performance of Logistics Service Providers as they play a key integrative role linking different supply chain elements more effectively. However, the role of the information technology capability of these 3PL has not drawn much attention. The research question is: can IT be viewed as a fundamental supply chain management coordination mechanism? If so, does IT capability of third party logistics providers to improve performance in the supply chain and become a bigger factor in a strategic buyer-3PL relationship? By drawing on earlier research on the supply chain management coordination mechanism, the IT capability of third party logistics providers, a case study is conducted.

Behavioral Intention Towards Mobile Banking in India

The rapid growth of mobile technologies and devices makes it possible for the customers of banking services to conduct banking at any place and at any time. Today, most of the banks in the world provide mobile access to its customers for banking as mobile banking systems improve their efficiency and reduce transaction costs. Banks invested heavily in the mobile banking system hoping that its customers would embrace it with open arms. Contrary to the expectation, the lukewarm patronage to mobile banking makes it crucial to understand the factors that contribute to users’ intention to use mobile banking. This study extends the applicability of technology acceptance model (TAM) to the mobile banking context. Based on the review of literature, few additional constructs were added to the TAM. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to test the casual relationships proposed. Findings of the study support the proposed model’s ability of explaining the users’ intention to adopt mobile banking.