14,506 research outputs found
Retail Big-Box Development and Small Business Strategy at the Local Level
The big-box superstore has created a dramatic effect on the retail landscape since its appearance in 1962. As big-box stores proliferate, small business owners continue to struggle with how to compete. The purpose of this multiple case study was to identify and explore strategies small business owners use to maintain or grow profit margins post big-box store market entry. The sample consisted of 5 small business owners in Kansas City, Missouri who survived the entry of the big-box store for at least 1 year. The conceptual framework was the general systems theory and systems thinking. Data were collected using semistructured interviews, archival data, and data mining. I used Yin\u27s five-phase process of compiling, disassembling, reassembling, interpreting, and concluding for data analysis where 3 themes emerged that contributed to the case study\u27s small businesses maintaining or increasing profits. These themes were employees and customers, finances, and organizational strategies. Key findings within the themes indicated that innovation, product differentiation, and flexibility were keys to profitability. The sustainability of small business in communities brings a variety of benefits to include social, economic, environmental, and aesthetic. These benefits can translate into tangible results such as a reduction in crime, increased social interaction, a stronger sense of identity, increased diversity, and more equity. Empowering local small business owners with sustainable business strategies could result in more businesses remaining profitable, leading to an improved standard of living for business owners and urban redevelopment as businesses flourish while contributing to local economies
Link Before You Share: Managing Privacy Policies through Blockchain
With the advent of numerous online content providers, utilities and
applications, each with their own specific version of privacy policies and its
associated overhead, it is becoming increasingly difficult for concerned users
to manage and track the confidential information that they share with the
providers. Users consent to providers to gather and share their Personally
Identifiable Information (PII). We have developed a novel framework to
automatically track details about how a users' PII data is stored, used and
shared by the provider. We have integrated our Data Privacy ontology with the
properties of blockchain, to develop an automated access control and audit
mechanism that enforces users' data privacy policies when sharing their data
across third parties. We have also validated this framework by implementing a
working system LinkShare. In this paper, we describe our framework on detail
along with the LinkShare system. Our approach can be adopted by Big Data users
to automatically apply their privacy policy on data operations and track the
flow of that data across various stakeholders.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, Published in: 4th International Workshop on
Privacy and Security of Big Data (PSBD 2017) in conjunction with 2017 IEEE
International Conference on Big Data (IEEE BigData 2017) December 14, 2017,
Boston, MA, US
Storage Solutions for Big Data Systems: A Qualitative Study and Comparison
Big data systems development is full of challenges in view of the variety of
application areas and domains that this technology promises to serve.
Typically, fundamental design decisions involved in big data systems design
include choosing appropriate storage and computing infrastructures. In this age
of heterogeneous systems that integrate different technologies for optimized
solution to a specific real world problem, big data system are not an exception
to any such rule. As far as the storage aspect of any big data system is
concerned, the primary facet in this regard is a storage infrastructure and
NoSQL seems to be the right technology that fulfills its requirements. However,
every big data application has variable data characteristics and thus, the
corresponding data fits into a different data model. This paper presents
feature and use case analysis and comparison of the four main data models
namely document oriented, key value, graph and wide column. Moreover, a feature
analysis of 80 NoSQL solutions has been provided, elaborating on the criteria
and points that a developer must consider while making a possible choice.
Typically, big data storage needs to communicate with the execution engine and
other processing and visualization technologies to create a comprehensive
solution. This brings forth second facet of big data storage, big data file
formats, into picture. The second half of the research paper compares the
advantages, shortcomings and possible use cases of available big data file
formats for Hadoop, which is the foundation for most big data computing
technologies. Decentralized storage and blockchain are seen as the next
generation of big data storage and its challenges and future prospects have
also been discussed
When Things Matter: A Data-Centric View of the Internet of Things
With the recent advances in radio-frequency identification (RFID), low-cost
wireless sensor devices, and Web technologies, the Internet of Things (IoT)
approach has gained momentum in connecting everyday objects to the Internet and
facilitating machine-to-human and machine-to-machine communication with the
physical world. While IoT offers the capability to connect and integrate both
digital and physical entities, enabling a whole new class of applications and
services, several significant challenges need to be addressed before these
applications and services can be fully realized. A fundamental challenge
centers around managing IoT data, typically produced in dynamic and volatile
environments, which is not only extremely large in scale and volume, but also
noisy, and continuous. This article surveys the main techniques and
state-of-the-art research efforts in IoT from data-centric perspectives,
including data stream processing, data storage models, complex event
processing, and searching in IoT. Open research issues for IoT data management
are also discussed
Efficient Iterative Processing in the SciDB Parallel Array Engine
Many scientific data-intensive applications perform iterative computations on
array data. There exist multiple engines specialized for array processing.
These engines efficiently support various types of operations, but none
includes native support for iterative processing. In this paper, we develop a
model for iterative array computations and a series of optimizations. We
evaluate the benefits of an optimized, native support for iterative array
processing on the SciDB engine and real workloads from the astronomy domain
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