Improving e-commerce fraud investigations in virtual, inter-institutional teams: Towards an approach based on Semantic Web technologies

There is a dramatic shift in credit card fraud from the offline to the online world. Large online retailers have tried to establish countermeasures and transaction data analysis technologies to lower the rate of fraudulent transactions to a manageable amount. But as retailers will always have to make a trade-off between the performance of the transaction processing, the usability of the web shop, and the overall security of it, one can assume that e-commerce fraud will still happen in the future. Thus, retailers have to collaborate with relevant business partners on the incident to find a common ground and take coordinated (legal) actions against it. Trying to combine the information from different stakeholders will face issues due to different wordings and data formats, competing incentives of the stakeholders to participate on information sharing, as well as possible sharing restrictions that prevent them from making the information available to a larger audience. Moreover, as some of the information might be confidential or business-critical to at least one of the parties involved, a centralized system (e.g. a service in the public cloud) can not be used. This Master Thesis is therefore analysing how far a computer supported collaborative work system based on peer-to-peer communication and Semantic Web technologies can improve the efficiency and effectivity of e-commerce fraud investigations within an inter-institutional team

Modeling and measuring Business/IT Alignment by using a complex-network approach

Tese de doutoramento em Tecnologias e Sistemas de InformaçãoBusiness/IT Alignment is an information systems research field with a long existence and a high number of researchers and represents a central thinking direction over the entanglement between business and information systems. lt aims to achieve a paradigm, on which there is a high degree of visibility and availability of information about the information systems sociomateriality. _ Complex-networks constitute an approach to the study of the emergent properties of complex-systems that strongly focuses and relies on models and measures, through which the system interdependence is built. Severa! characteristics of complex-networks are: structural or functional topology; domain independent; quantification of elements' relationships; visibility and capture of emergent properties. This thesis aims to contribute for the appropriate use of complex-networks' models and measures in the effort of the Business/ IT Alignment. lt outlines a profiling framework that introduces a global analysis of the information systems enactment. The profiling framework is applied to exploratory cases to uncover the emergent nature of the Business/ IT Alignment through its information systems virtual organization. From the analysis of the exploratory cases, information systems efforts to accomplish Business/ IT Alignment are inferred.O alinhamento entre o negócio e o IT é um campo de investigação com uma longa existência e concentrando um grande numero de investigadores representando uma direção central no pensamento sobre a relação entre o negocio e o IT. Pretende alcançar um paradigma no qual existe um elevado grau de visibilidade e disponibilidade de informação sobre a relação sociomaterial que constitui o sistema de informação. As redes-complexas constituem uma abordagem ao estudo de propriedades emergentes de sistemas-complexos e que se foca e sustenta em modelos e medidas através das quais constrói a interdependência do sistema. Diversas contribuições das redes complexas são: a topologia estrutural e funcional afecta sempre a função; separada do dominio de aplicação; quantificação das relações entre os elementos; visibilidade e captura de propriedades emergentes. Esta tese espera contribuir para a utilização adequada aos sistemas de informação dos modelos e medidas das redes-complexas no esforços de alinhamento entre o negócio e o IT. Desenvolve uma framework de caracterização que introduz uma análise global aos sistemas de informação. A framework é aplicada a casos exploratórios de forma a revelar a natureza emergente do alinhamento entre o negócio e o IT através da organização virtual dos sistemas de informaçã

On Self Organising Cyberdynamic Policy

The de facto model of what it means to be effectively organised, hence cybernetically viable, is Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM). Many studies attest to the efficacy of what the VSM proposes, however, these appear to be largely confined to human based organisations of particular types e.g. businesses of assorted sizes and governmental matters. The original contribution to the body of knowledge that this work makes, in contrast, has come from an unconventional source i.e. football (soccer) teams. The unique opportunity identified was to use the vast amounts of football player spatial data, as captured by match scanning technology, to obtain simultaneously the multi-recursive policy characteristics of a real viable system operating in real time under highly dynamical load (threat/opportunity) conditions. It accomplishes this by considering player movement as being representative of the output of the policy function of the viable system model that they, hence their whole team, are each mapped to. As each player decides what they must do at any moment, or might need to do in the immediate future, this is set against their capabilities to deliver against that. This can be said of every player during every stage of any match. As such, their actions (their policies as viable systems) inform, and are informed by, the actions of others. This results in the teams of players behaving in a self-organising manner. Accordingly, in spatially varying player location, one has a single metric that characterises player, hence team function, and ultimately whole team policy as the policy of a viable system, that is amenable to analysis. A key behavioural characteristic of a self-organising system is a power law. Accordingly, by searching for, and obtaining, a power law associated with player movement one thereby obtains the output of the policy function of that whole team as a viable system, and hence the viable system model that the team maps to. At the heart of such activity is communication between the players as they proceed to do what they need to do at any given time during a match. This has offered another unique opportunity to measure the amount of spatially underpinned Information exhibited by the opposing teams in their entirety and to set those in juxtaposition with their respective power law characteristics and associated match outcomes. This meant that the power law characteristic that represents the policy of the viable system, and the amount of Information associated with that could be, and was, examined in the context of success or failure outcomes (as criteria of viability) to discern if some combinations of both were more profitable than not. This was accomplished in this work by using player position data from an anonymous member of the English Premier Football League playing in an unknown season to provide a quantitative analysis accordingly