Informal Online Decision Making: Current Practices and Support System Design

Existing group decision support systems are too complex to support lightweight, informal decision making made popular by the amount of information available on the Web. From an examination of related work, an online survey and a formative study to examine how people currently use the Web for decision support, we present a set of design recommendations towards the development of an informal Web decision support tool

Public environmental information: understanding requirements and patterns of likely public use

Public access to environmental information received much attention in the last decade. Recent developments promote access to this information through public telecommunication networks. This paper describes a Web-based survey that explored the requirements and needs of likely users of public environmental information systems for London: educated middle-class members of the public, with high interest in environmental issues and computer literacy. The survey demonstrated current information consumption patterns and the reasons to gather and use such information

A comparative analysis of executive information systems in organisations in South Africa and Spain

Executive Information Systems (EIS) grew out of the information needs of executives and are designed to serve the needs of users in strategic planning and decision-making. EIS are high risk information technology (IT) implementation projects. With the emergence of global information technologies, existing paradigms are being altered which are spawning new considerations for IT implementation. Web-based technologies are causing a revisit to existing IT implementation models, including those for EIS. The authors compare two recent survey studies of EIS implementation in well-established organisations in South Africa and Spain. From a comparative analysis, the authors report six identified similarities and three differences in EIS in these countries

Integration via Meaning: Using the Semantic Web to deliver Web Services

Presented at the CRIS2002 Conference in Kassel.-- 9 pages.-- Contains: Conference paper (PDF) + PPT presentation.The major developments of the World Wide Web (WWW) in the last two years have been Web Services and the Semantic Web. The former allows the construction of distributed systems across the WWW by providing a lightweight middleware architecture. The latter provides an infrastructure for accessing resources on the WWW via their relationships with respect to conceptual descriptions. In this paper, I shall review the progress undertaken in each of these two areas. Further, I shall argue that in order for the aims of both the Semantic Web and the Web Services activities to be successful, then the Web Service architecture needs to be augmented by concepts and tools of the Semantic Web. This infrastructure will allow resource discovery, brokering and access to be enabled in a standardised, integrated and interoperable manner. Finally, I survey the CLRC Information Technology R&D programme to show how it is contributing to the development of this future infrastructure

Web Data Extraction, Applications and Techniques: A Survey

Web Data Extraction is an important problem that has been studied by means of different scientific tools and in a broad range of applications. Many approaches to extracting data from the Web have been designed to solve specific problems and operate in ad-hoc domains. Other approaches, instead, heavily reuse techniques and algorithms developed in the field of Information Extraction. This survey aims at providing a structured and comprehensive overview of the literature in the field of Web Data Extraction. We provided a simple classification framework in which existing Web Data Extraction applications are grouped into two main classes, namely applications at the Enterprise level and at the Social Web level. At the Enterprise level, Web Data Extraction techniques emerge as a key tool to perform data analysis in Business and Competitive Intelligence systems as well as for business process re-engineering. At the Social Web level, Web Data Extraction techniques allow to gather a large amount of structured data continuously generated and disseminated by Web 2.0, Social Media and Online Social Network users and this offers unprecedented opportunities to analyze human behavior at a very large scale. We discuss also the potential of cross-fertilization, i.e., on the possibility of re-using Web Data Extraction techniques originally designed to work in a given domain, in other domains.Comment: Knowledge-based System

Estimating non-response bias in a web-based survey of technology acceptance : a case study of unit guide information systems

Surveys are mostly challenged by response rates. Among the various types of survey research, web-based (internet-based/electronic/online) surveys are commonly used for data collection for a geographically diverse population. In surveys with high/low response rates, non-response bias can be a major concern. While it is not always possible to measure the actual bias due to non-response there are different approaches and techniques that help to identify reasons of non-response bias. The aims of this paper are twofold. (1) To provide an appropriate, interesting and important non-response bias case study for future web-based surveys that will provide guidance to other Information Systems researchers. The case-study concerns an online-survey to evaluate a technology acceptance model for Unit Guide Information systems (UGIS). (2) To discuss how nonresponse bias in a web-based technology acceptance study of an information system (UGIS in this case) can be contained and managed.<br /

Knowledge and Metadata Integration for Warehousing Complex Data

With the ever-growing availability of so-called complex data, especially on the Web, decision-support systems such as data warehouses must store and process data that are not only numerical or symbolic. Warehousing and analyzing such data requires the joint exploitation of metadata and domain-related knowledge, which must thereby be integrated. In this paper, we survey the types of knowledge and metadata that are needed for managing complex data, discuss the issue of knowledge and metadata integration, and propose a CWM-compliant integration solution that we incorporate into an XML complex data warehousing framework we previously designed.Comment: 6th International Conference on Information Systems Technology and its Applications (ISTA 07), Kharkiv : Ukraine (2007

A survey of UK university web management: staffing, systems and issues

Purpose: The purpose of the paper is to summarize the findings of a survey of UK universities about how their web site is managed and resourced, which technologies are in use and what are seen as the main issues and priorities. Methodology/approach: The paper is based on a web based questionnaire distributed in summer 2006, and which received 104 usable responses from 87 insitutions. Findings: The survey showed that some web teams were based in IT and some in external relations, yet in both cases the site typically served internal and external audiences. The role of web manager is partly management of resources, time and people, partly about marketing and liaison and partly also concerned with more technical aspects including interface design and HTML. But it is a diverse role with a wide spread of responsibilities. On the whole web teams were relatively small. Three quarters of responding institutions had a CMS, but specific systems in use were diverse. 60% had a portal. There was evidence of increasing use of blogs and wikis. The key driver for the web site is student recruitment, with instituitional reputation and information to stakeholders also being important. The biggest perceived weaknesses were maintaining consistency with devolved content creation and currency of content; lack of resourcing a key threat while comprehensiveness was a key strength. Current and wished for projects pointed again to the diversity of the sector. Research implications/limitations: The lack of comparative data and difficulties of interpreting responses to closed questions where respondents could have quite different status (partly reflecting divergent patterns of governance of the web across the sector) create issues with the reliability of the research. Practical implications: Data about resourcing of web management, technology in use etc at comparable institutions is invaluable for practitioners in their efforts to gain resource in their own context. Originality/value of paper: The paper adds more systematic, current data to our limited knowledge about how university web sites are managed