Balancing Requirements For Customer Value Of Mobile Services

Designing business models for mobile services is a complex undertaking because it requires multiple actors to balance different design requirements. A business model can be seen as a blueprint of four interrelated components or domains: service, technology, organization and finance domain. Little attention has been paid to how these different domains are related to each other. This knowledge is needed to enhance our understanding of what constitutes a viable business model. In this paper the connections between two of these domains, namely service and technology domain, are explored by analysing critical design issues in business models for mobile services, i.e. targeting, creating value, branding and customer retention in the service domain, and security, quality of service, management of service profiles, system integration and accessibility in the technology domain. A causal framework is developed, which link these critical design issues to expected customer value and business model viability.

Applying semantic web services to enterprise web

Enterprise Web provides a convenient, extendable, integrated platform for information sharing and knowledge management. However, it still has many drawbacks due to complexity and increasing information glut, as well as the heterogeneity of the information processed. Research in the field of Semantic Web Services has shown the possibility of adding higher level of semantic functionality onto the top of current Enterprise Web, enhancing usability and usefulness of resource, enabling decision support and automation. This paper aims to explore the use of Semantic Web Services in Enterprise Web and discuss the Semantic Web Services (SWS) approach for designing Enterprise Web applications. A Semantic Web Service oriented model is presented, in which resources and services are described by ontology, and processed through Semantic Web Service, allowing integrated administration, interoperability and automated reasoning

Blockchain For Food: Making Sense of Technology and the Impact on Biofortified Seeds

The global food system is under pressure and is in the early stages of a major transition towards more transparency, circularity, and personalisation. In the coming decades, there is an increasing need for more food production with fewer resources. Thus, increasing crop yields and nutritional value per crop is arguably an important factor in this global food transition. Biofortification can play an important role in feeding the world. Biofortified seeds create produce with increased nutritional values, mainly minerals and vitamins, while using the same or less resources as non-biofortified variants. However, a farmer cannot distinguish a biofortified seed from a regular seed. Due to the invisible nature of the enhanced seeds, counterfeit products are common, limiting wide-scale adoption of biofortified crops. Fraudulent seeds pose a major obstacle in the adoption of biofortified crops. A system that could guarantee the origin of the biofortified seeds is therefore required to ensure widespread adoption. This trust-ensuring immutable proof for the biofortified seeds, can be provided via blockchain technology

Survey on Quality of Observation within Sensor Web Systems

The Sensor Web vision refers to the addition of a middleware layer between sensors and applications. To bridge the gap between these two layers, Sensor Web systems must deal with heterogeneous sources, which produce heterogeneous observations of disparate quality. Managing such diversity at the application level can be complex and requires high levels of expertise from application developers. Moreover, as an information-centric system, any Sensor Web should provide support for Quality of Observation (QoO) requirements. In practice, however, only few Sensor Webs provide satisfying QoO support and are able to deliver high-quality observations to end consumers in a specific manner. This survey aims to study why and how observation quality should be addressed in Sensor Webs. It proposes three original contributions. First, it provides important insights into quality dimensions and proposes to use the QoO notion to deal with information quality within Sensor Webs. Second, it proposes a QoO-oriented review of 29 Sensor Web solutions developed between 2003 and 2016, as well as a custom taxonomy to characterise some of their features from a QoO perspective. Finally, it draws four major requirements required to build future adaptive and QoO-aware Sensor Web solutions

The Global Campus: ICT and the Global Transformation of Higher Education

This paper analyses the changes which the ICT drives in a global scale. The emergence of e-Infrastructure for e-Science, the Open Educational Resources movement, e-Libraries and the tendency of building global educational alliances are analysed as well. The paper puts in focus the influence of the Web 2.0 technologies and the new organizational models they drive, e.g. Enterprise 2.0, University 2.0. A new university model is defined – the Global Campus Model. Some arguments that the ultimate result of the ICT driven transformation in the world could make the whole world to become a Global Campus in the next few decade

The Emerging Global Campus Model

This paper analyses the Emerging Global Model of universities as well as the changes which the ICT drives in a global scale. The emergence of e-Infrastructure for e-Science, the Open Educational Resources movement, e-Libraries and the tendency of building global educational alliances are analysed as well. The paper puts in focus the influence of the Web 2.0 technologies and the new organizational models they drive, e.g. Enterprise 2.0, University 2.0. A new university model is defined – the Emerging Global Campus Model. Some arguments that the ultimate result of the ICT driven transformation in the world could make the whole world to become a Global Campus in the next few decades

New Generation Sensor Web Enablement

Many sensor networks have been deployed to monitor Earth’s environment, and more will follow in the future. Environmental sensors have improved continuously by becoming smaller, cheaper, and more intelligent. Due to the large number of sensor manufacturers and differing accompanying protocols, integrating diverse sensors into observation systems is not straightforward. A coherent infrastructure is needed to treat sensors in an interoperable, platform-independent and uniform way. The concept of the Sensor Web reflects such a kind of infrastructure for sharing, finding, and accessing sensors and their data across different applications. It hides the heterogeneous sensor hardware and communication protocols from the applications built on top of it. The Sensor Web Enablement initiative of the Open Geospatial Consortium standardizes web service interfaces and data encodings which can be used as building blocks for a Sensor Web. This article illustrates and analyzes the recent developments of the new generation of the Sensor Web Enablement specification framework. Further, we relate the Sensor Web to other emerging concepts such as the Web of Things and point out challenges and resulting future work topics for research on Sensor Web Enablement