THE ROLE OF COLLABORATIVE SOFTWARE AND DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS IN THE SMARTER CITIES

The transition from the traditional city to the smart city is made by supported efforts regarding the achievement of a more steady, more efficient, more responsible city, through convergent strategies that deal with Smart Transportation Systems, Energy and Utilities Management, Water Management, Smart Public Safety, Healthcare Systems, Environmental Management, Educational Systems, Telecommunications (ITC Support),etc. and Positive Thinking. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) meets the customers’ needs and the administration, the management of data, information, knowledge and decisions through Collaborative Systems and Decision Support Systems have a major impact both at the level of the smart city and the level of subsystems/services, and the information technology within smart cities becomes a major direction of research in the field of ITC.Smart City, Collaborative Systems, Decision Support Systems (DSS), Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Portal technology

Is a Semantic Web Agent a Knowledge-Savvy Agent?

The issue of knowledge sharing has permeated the field of distributed AI and in particular, its successor, multiagent systems. Through the years, many research and engineering efforts have tackled the problem of encoding and sharing knowledge without the need for a single, centralized knowledge base. However, the emergence of modern computing paradigms such as distributed, open systems have highlighted the importance of sharing distributed and heterogeneous knowledge at a larger scale—possibly at the scale of the Internet. The very characteristics that define the Semantic Web—that is, dynamic, distributed, incomplete, and uncertain knowledge—suggest the need for autonomy in distributed software systems. Semantic Web research promises more than mere management of ontologies and data through the definition of machine-understandable languages. The openness and decentralization introduced by multiagent systems and service-oriented architectures give rise to new knowledge management models, for which we can’t make a priori assumptions about the type of interaction an agent or a service may be engaged in, and likewise about the message protocols and vocabulary used. We therefore discuss the problem of knowledge management for open multi-agent systems, and highlight a number of challenges relating to the exchange and evolution of knowledge in open environments, which pertinent to both the Semantic Web and Multi Agent System communities alike

An overview on leveraging social media technology for uncovering tacit knowledge sharing in an organizational context

Over the years, businesses have transformed from the traditional manufacturing-oriented to service-oriented. Along with this, tacit knowledge has become more crucial as organizations move toward innovation and service orientation. In summary, the knowledge of an organization's workforce is tacit knowledge related to their belief and expertise, which can be difficult to define, given its inexpressible characteristics. The practice of knowledge management is often associated with the use of information systems and the effort to codify, share and create knowledge using relevant knowledge management systems. Although social media is widely adopted by organizations to enhance the effectiveness of knowledge sharing practices, there is still a large amount of uncertainty on whether information systems act as an environment for the sharing of tacit knowledge. The purpose of this study is to understand the significant role of social media in offering tacit knowledge. Wiki, because of its collaborative and conversational bases, was chosen as an example of a social media and the methodology undertaken in this study is literature review. This study contributes to a discussion on the increasingly important role of social media in the dissemination of tacit knowledge in an organizational context

Constructing an Online Property Management System for Leisure Farms

Taiwan\u27s flourishing tourism industry has stimulated the development of a small and medium-sized hotel industry, including leisure farms. Nevertheless, most small hotel operators lack sufficient hotel operation and management knowledge. Although the adoption of appropriate property management systems (PMSs) could help small hotels improve management performance, the huge purchase costs and maintenance expenses of conventional property management systems make them unsuitable for most leisure farms and other small hotels. In order to overcome this problem, this study tries to take a nominal leisure farm in South Taiwan as an example, and employs the Web service concept to create a suitable online property management system. The findings of this study reveal that a Web service model incorporating the concepts of software as a service and service-oriented architecture can successfully reduce software deployment time and costs, hardware adoption costs, and overall maintenance manpower costs

Just-in-time Knowledge: Knowledge Mobilization in a Public Health Network

One question of great importance to Information Systems (IS) researchers is how to effectively and efficiently move expertknowledge from researchers to practitioners. This paper identifies a novel knowledge use process – knowledge mobilization– which focuses on the process of organizing knowledge and making it ready for active service within a community. Aliterature review of knowledge management concepts including knowledge transfer, reuse, sharing, sourcing, and informationseeking suggests that knowledge mobilization is a distinct concept, distinguishable from the other concepts in the existing ISliterature. A case study of a public health-oriented network (Supercourse) provides an example of a knowledge mobilizationsystem that delivers just-in-time knowledge

Toward domain-specific design environments: Some representation ideas from the telecommunications domain

ACME is an experimental environment for investigating new approaches to modeling and analysis of system requirements and designs. ACME is built on and extends object-oriented conceptual modeling techniques and knowledge representation and reasoning (KRR) tools. The most immediate intended use for ACME is to help represent, understand, and communicate system designs during the early stages of system planning and requirements engineering. While our research is ostensibly aimed at software systems in general, we are particularly motivated to make an impact in the telecommunications domain, especially in the area referred to as Intelligent Networks (IN's). IN systems contain the software to provide services to users of a telecommunications network (e.g., call processing services, information services, etc.) as well as the software that provides the internal infrastructure for providing the services (e.g., resource management, billing, etc.). The software includes not only systems developed by the network proprietors but also by a growing group of independent service software providers

Service-Learning in Information Systems Courses: Community Projects that Make a Difference

Service-learning methodologies provide information systems students the opportunity to create and implement systems in real-world, public service-oriented social contexts. Students contract with local non-profit and government agencies to provide needed information systems services and solutions that are closely related to the specific course topics, such as database creation for a database course, system evaluation for a systems design and analysis course, or even a larger scope for a capstone course. In these activities, students actively evaluate and analyze the complex contributors associated with understanding problem domains as well as design and implement real-world solutions. Multi-dimensional learning takes place as they simultaneously assume the role of professional consultants producing systems that are immediately used and by the client. The student learning outcomes include a deep learning of the course technical knowledge, improved interpersonal communication skills, more effective client and project management skills, and an enhanced societal sensitivity for the value of their information systems knowledge to their community

Myopia of service-oriented holonic manufacturing systems: the contribution of an observer

Volume 402Service orientation paradigm is particularly well adapted to distributed manu-facturing systems. The difficulty of such systems' production activity control deals with the knowledge management. Indeed, the knowledge is distributed among each entity, which is able to create, modify or communicate them with oth-er entities. As a matter of fact, any entity cannot have a full up-to-date access to all the data of the system. On the shop floor level, a convenient way to implement service oriented manufacturing systems is to rely on the paradigm of Holonic Manufacturing Systems. This paper introduces the possibility of specializing a re-source holon with the objectives to gather the data from the whole holarchy and make these data available to any holon for a decision making. This holon is thus playing the role of a discrete-event observer. After positioning the service-oriented architectures, the HMS reference architecture PROSA is described, especially in terms of decision making. After the decisions were defined, the problematic of on-line decision making in a HMS is described, and a solution of implementation of the observer and of forecasting tools in the architecture is exposed. Finally, two applications are presented, based on an industrial job-shop

On semantic annotation of decision models

The growth of service sector in recent years has led to renewed research interests in the design and management of service systems. Decision support systems (DSS) play an important role in supporting this endeavor, through management of organizational resources such as models and data, thus forming the “back stage” of service systems. In this article, we identify the requirements for semantically annotating decision models and propose a model representation scheme, termed Semantically Annotated Structure Modeling Markup Language (SA-SMML) that extends Structure Modeling Markup Language (SMML) by incorporating mechanisms for linking semantic models such as ontologies that represent problem domain knowledge concepts. This model representation format is also amenable to a scalable Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) for managing models in distributed environments. The proposed model representation technique leverages recent advances in the areas of semantic web, and semantic web services. Along with design considerations, we demonstrate the utility of this representation format with an illustrative usage scenarios with a particular emphasis on model discovery and composition in a distributed environment