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In the theory of denotational semantics of programming languages, several authors proved the existence of particular kinds of universal domains. D. Scott constructed universal information systems, which are, however, not unique up to isomorphism. Here, we use a model-theoretic technique to establish the existence and uniqueness of a universal homogeneous information system. Similar results are also obtained for canonical and for stable information systems, respectively.

In this document, an approach to the development of WWW-accessible astronomical archives and databases is described, which can easily be extended also to other disciplines. The architecture is based on a set of servers running at the archive site, each performing a specialized task: accessing an SQL-based DBMS, retrieving and downlinking 1-D or 2-D data (measurements), displaying quicklook data, or plotting the results of a query to the database. All of the information on the user interface is dynamically stored in the database, allowing the pages to be prepared on-the-fly; no additional software needs to be run on the user’s computer. A WWW-accessible test astronomical archive, containing both 2-D (images) and 1-D (spectra) data, and having NCSA/Mosaic as an interface is described as an example of successful application of the above concepts.

The Internet platform has become the most popular one to build integrated applications. This paper describes the design and implementation of an innovative e-Forecasting application over the Internet. The application delivers timeseries' forecasts on-line via the Internet. The user can choose amongst classic forecasting techniques including the Theta model. This study discusses why such an application is innovative and interesting to the IT community. The architecture which is proposed implements an advanced e-forecasting application and also offers web-service interfaces for third party applications. This dual functionality of the proposed architecture makes it extensible and rigid.

There is every indication that an object-oriented view of an information system is a solid foundation for understanding its legacy organization, for relating it to the environment in which it is embedded and for guiding its reengineering. In this paper we present a framework based upon the formal object-oriented specification language TROLL, which provides an object-oriented view of legacy information systems. The aim is to combine existing methods and keep results in a common and suitable description base which provides the appropriate form for deriving object specifications from the legacy IS. We usethe language TROLL not only as description language, but also as a framework to support the maintenance engineers in their reverse engineering tasks by giving hints about what to do next to complete the object specifications. The result of the approach is a formal object-oriented specification of the legacy IS that is suitable both for developing a new IS or for reengineering the legacy system.

Document Processing Systems (DPSs) support office workers to manage information. Document classification is a major function of DPSs. By analyzing a document’s layout and conceptual structures, we present in this paper a sample-based approach to document classification.

We represent a document’s layout structure by an ordered labeled tree through a procedure known as nested segmentation and represent the document’s conceptual structure by a set of attribute type pairs. The layout similarities between the document to be classified and sample documents are determined by a previously developed approximate tree matching toolkit. The conceptual similarities between the documents are determined by analyzing their contents and by calculating the degree of conceptual closeness. The document type is identified by computing both the layout and conceptual similarities between the document to be classified and the samples in the document sample base. Some experimental results are presented, which demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed techniques.

We propose an object-oriented logical formalism to conceptionally model applications in an interoperable environment. Such an environment consists of heterogeneous and autonomous local (database) systems. Applications in such an environment use several resources and services. Their conceptual modelling involves re-specification of existing systems in terms of homogeneous views, modelling of behavior and system dynamics, modelling of logically distributed components in an open environment and the modelling of communication relationships and dependencies between components. We introduce a formal object-oriented language capable of dealing with these requirements and illustrate its use to model applications in an interoperable environment.

Requirements for continuing progress in Information Systems usability are surveyed and analyzed.

Concerns about energy and sustainability are growing everyday involving a wide range of fields. Even Information Systems (ISs) are being influenced by the issue of reducing pollution and energy consumption and new fields are rising dealing with this topic. One of these fields is Green Information Technology (IT), which deals with energy efficiency with a focus on IT. Researchers have faced this problem according to several points of view. The purpose of this paper is to understand the trends and the future development of Green IT by analyzing the state-of-the-art and classifying existing approaches to understand which are the components that have an impact on energy efficiency in ISs and how this impact can be reduced. At first, we explore some guidelines that can help to understand the efficiency level of an organization and of an IS. Then, we discuss measurement and estimation of energy efficiency and identify which are the components that mainly contribute to energy waste and how it is possible to improve energy efficiency, both at the hardware and at the software level.

The focus of this paper is on the modeling of application and business process in Cooperative Information Systems. Such processes use several resources and services to achieve a common, global system goal. We integrate the proposed concepts into the framework of a formal object-oriented specification language (TROLL). The goals of our approach are to provide additional modeling support for business and application processes, to explain these processes in the underlying framework and to couple tightly the modeling of global processes and the modeling of structural aspects of the system.

System evolution and re-engineering are becoming increasingly important as the size and complexity of Information Systems continue to grow. The paper addresses the problems related to the development of abstraction mechanisms for building reference conceptual architectures of Information Systems, i.e. standardized descriptions of their most significant concepts, to be used for matching and validating changes to the system.

Interview with Frost & Sullivan — Celebrating Best Practices in Healthcare.

Interview with InterSystems Corporation — Connecting Applications, Processes and People Intelligently.

Interview with Philips Healthcare — Excellence in Medical Imaging & Radiology.

Interview with Roche Diagnostics — Cutting-Edge Clinical Diagnostics.

Set-valued information systems are generalized models of single-valued information systems. Its semantic interpretation can be classified into two categories: disjunctive and conjunctive. We focus on the former in this paper. By introducing four types of dominance relations to the disjunctive set-valued information systems, we establish a dominance-based rough sets approach, which is mainly based on the substitution of the indiscernibility relation by the dominance relations. Furthermore, we develop a new approach to sorting for objects in disjunctive set-valued ordered information systems, which is based on the dominance class of an object induced by a dominance relation. Finally, we propose criterion reductions of disjunctive set-valued ordered information systems that eliminate only those information that are not essential from the ordering of objects. The approaches show how to simplify a disjunctive set-valued ordered information system. Throughout this paper, we establish in detail the interrelationships among the four types of dominance relations, which include corresponding dominance classes, rough sets approaches, sorting for objects and criterion reductions. These results give a kind of feasible approaches to intelligent decision making in disjunctive set-valued ordered information systems.

Successful customer relationship management (CRM) depend on strategic skills and reflect the sharpness of long-term cooperation and organizational values. The purpose of the study will explore operational and analytical implementation of information system (IS) may lead to market strategy and CRM performances of a hotel. A CRM performance model was formulated by ISs success perspective in the study, and we collected international tourism hotel samples by mailing questionnaire survey in Taiwan. We mailed 232 questionnaires to hotels, of which 151 returned completed questionnaires and we test the model and hypotheses by structural equation modeling (SEM) and multilevel analysis for our research. As this result of the study, the role of IS will transfer from the transaction process system to a strategic supporting role, collecting information is important process to hoteliers, staffs prepare to personalize service for a guest in advance when they have more information about guest. And the capability of leveraging analytics in operations can be a critical differentiator for hotel to stay competitive. As a business discipline, this research could be directed toward helping managers and practitioners decide CRM implementation priority, and improve both business processes and competitiveness through the deployment of a CRM system.

The concept of Big Data in academic and professional literature has developed in a euphoric, chaotic, and unstructured manner. Decision-making is increasingly relying on Big Data, resorting to novel analytic methodologies that are applied in many different industries. This study aims to provide clarity over the Big Data phenomenon by means of a comprehensive and systematic literature review, able to produce a clear description of what Big Data is today, a structured classification of the various streams of current research, and a list of promising emerging trends. This study analyses a corpus of 4,327 articles through a novel combination of unsupervised algorithms that produces a hierarchical topic structure which empirically validates and enhances the “Information,” “Technology,” “Methods,” and “Impact” conceptual model of Big Data, identifying 17 fundamental topics and providing researchers and practitioners with a meaningful overview of the body of knowledge and a proposed research agenda.

A knowledge asset has been increasingly recognised as the most valuable asset in organisations as it playing an enabling role in formulating a successful strategies and achieving a sustainable competitive advantage. However, to continuously capture, maintain and reuse the key information, and arbitrates the strategic knowledge assets, KM should be aligned with business process, organisations and IT. Therefore, the aim of the current study is to investigate the direct effect of the contextual factors such as IT infrastructure and skills, existence of CKO and knowledge sharing on the KM strategic alignment between KM and IS strategy (KMSA-IS) in the banking sector at Arabian Gulf countries. However, cultural factors such as openness to change, organisational structure and trust were examined to have indirect effect on KMSA-IS via the knowledge sharing. In addition, the impact of KMSA-IS on the organisational performance was examined. The results revealed that the contextual factors such as IT infrastructure and skills and existence of CKO as well as the knowledge sharing have shown a significant contribution on KMSA-IS. Organisational structure and trust however, revealed to have indirect impact on KMSA-IS via the knowledge sharing. Therefore, executive managers in the Arabian Gulf banking sectors should adopt new rules using flexible organisational culture, reforming and redesigning their organisational structure and incorporating an advanced IT in their operations for competitive advantage. Moreover, they need to establish an alignment between KM and IS strategy in order to move their KM systems in a direction that holds promise for long-lasting competitive advantage.

Health information systems (HISs) provide automated solutions for the clinical, informational, and managerial life of a hospital. These systems are optimally used when the knowledge workers are adequately equipped with the needed competencies. Three Kuwaiti hospitals have been engaged in adopting and using the same HIS. Jahra Public Hospital, one of the three, has been making progress in the use of HIS. It was hypothesised that capabilities and preparedness of knowledge workers are correlated with their extent of use of the HIS. Data were gathered from 124 healthcare knowledge workers using stratified random sampling. It was found that skills and abilities of these knowledge professionals are strongly correlated with their use of information and communication technologies (ICT) and HIS. Almost all the professionals used HIS, yet there was a wide variation in the use of HIS modules and applications. We also examined whether personal attributes of knowledge workers made any difference in their ICT and HIS skills and use. Results however revealed no such association. These professionals attached a great deal of importance with formal training, but urged that these knowledge workers had enhanced and involved role.

Patents are recognised as an important source of scientific knowledge. The automatic summarisation process of patents can assist in the organisation, and, consequently, the access to the contents of patent databases. The main contribution of this work is to carry out a study of training approaches of a hybrid summarisation model to create concise, single sentence summaries for patent documents. The experiments were executed using a dataset containing more than 80,000 patents, made available by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Comparative experiments between the selected model and seven state-of-the-art models in extractive, abstractive and hybrid text summarisation (HTS) were performed. The results obtained showed that the selected approach produces better results than extractive and HTS models, and yields good prospects in extremely concise summaries. It is concluded that the study of different training approaches, coupled with the analysis of the attention words weights in the final results, is an important step in this process, impacting directly the choice of the final summarisation model. Besides this, the results of the experiments suggest that the removal of stop words from the input text did not generate better results, although the attention words extracted with the model without stop words were, in general, better.

In spite of the benefits associated with Automated Traveler Information Systems (ATIS), little attention has been given to its implementation in Sub-Saharan Africa. However, the management of Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology has made efforts to implement this technology on their campus transport services. It is in this regard that the researchers sought to investigate the factors that will influence the student’s intention to adopt ATIS. The Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT2) with self-efficacy, system quality and gender as moderators were employed in the study. The results indicate that performance expectancy, facilitating conditions and habit are the true predictors of people’s intention to use ATIS. Moreover, self-efficacy and gender were also found to moderate the relationship between behavioral intention and use behavior. This is among the few attempts to examine the factors that may influence user’s adoption of ATIS in Sub-Saharan Africa.

While information technology (IT) has grown rapidly in enterprises, scholars have emphasized the importance of IT factors and aspects, while limited attention has been paid to the barriers and challenges facing the adoption of IT. In light of this, we stress the importance of barriers inhibiting IT adoption within Small and Medium Enterprises (SME). For this purpose, this paper aims to create a systematic literature review in order to provide a better understanding of barriers to IT adoption within SME. On the basis of 132 selected studies, we identify 18 barriers categorized according to internal and external parameters. Finally, we underline a synthesis and avenues for future research, and provide scientific and managerial implications and guidance for the adoption of IT in SME.

In network telemetry systems, nodes produce vast number of configuration files based on how they are configured. Steps were taken to process these files into databases to help the work of the developers, testers and customer support to focus on the development and testing and to be able to give advice to the customers about how to configure the nodes. However, the processing of these data in relational database manager system is slow, hard to query and the storage takes huge disk space.

In this paper, we are presenting a way to store the data produced by these nodes in graph database, changing from relational database to NoSQL environment. With our approach, one can easily represent and visualize the network of machines.

In the end, we are going to compare the inserting, querying time and storage size in different database manager systems. The results could also be used for other types of configuration data too from other kinds of machines to show the connection between them and query them easily.