Knowledge Cartography: Software tools and mapping techniques

Knowledge Cartography is the discipline of mapping intellectual landscapes.The focus of this book is on the process by which manually crafting interactive, hypertextual maps clarifies one’s own understanding, as well as communicating it.The authors see mapping software as a set of visual tools for reading and writing in a networked age. In an information ocean, the primary challenge is to find meaningful patterns around which we can weave plausible narratives. Maps of concepts, discussions and arguments make the connections between ideas tangible and disputable. With 17 chapters from the leading researchers and practitioners, the reader will find the current state–of-the-art in the field. Part 1 focuses on educational applications in schools and universities, before Part 2 turns to applications in professional communitie

The engineering, management, and philosophy of service-oriented information systems

In this special issue on “The Engineering, Management, and Philosophy of Service-Oriented Information Systems” for the International Journal of Information Systems and the Service Sector (IJISSS), are presented five high-quality research articles

Guest editorial preface: special issue on Evolving security and privacy requirements engineering (ESPRE'14) 2014, Sweden.

At the Evolving Security and Privacy Requirements Engineering (ESPRE) workshop, practitioners and researchers interested in security and privacy requirements gather to discuss significant issues in the field. In particular, ESPRE participants probe the interfaces between requirements engineering, security and privacy. At ESPRE workshops, participants also take the first step in evolving security and privacy requirements engineering to meet the needs of stakeholders, ranging from business analysts and security engineers to technology entrepreneurs and privacy advocates. The most recent ESPRE workshop was held in Karlskrona, Sweden in August 2014, and was co-located with the RE 2014 conference

Barry Smith an sich

Festschrift in Honor of Barry Smith on the occasion of his 65th Birthday. Published as issue 4:4 of the journal Cosmos + Taxis: Studies in Emergent Order and Organization. Includes contributions by Wolfgang Grassl, Nicola Guarino, John T. Kearns, Rudolf Lüthe, Luc Schneider, Peter Simons, Wojciech Żełaniec, and Jan Woleński

A Method for Building a Referent Business Activity Model for Evaluating Information Systems: Results from a Case Study

In this dynamic age of corporate acquisitions, mergers, and enterprise integration, decisions concerning the evaluation and selection of information systems require comparing the functionality of each candidate system to the intended business activities that it will support. However, consensus on the definition of business activities used to support this evaluation is rare. What is needed is a referent business activity model that defines the business in a manner to serve as the basis for determining how well each candidate system supports the business. This paper 1) defines the referent business activity model concept; 2) provides an example from a case study of business activity modeling; and 3) demonstrates the utility of this model in defining functional requirements for selecting the optimal system from a set of 30 legacy systems to be used throughout the United States Department of Defense (DoD). Twenty-nine DoD business experts were able to construct a referent business activity model consisting of 65 business activities organized in a hierarchical manner. These activities served as the foundation for a questionnaire of 165 questions used to select three information systems out of the over 300 known systems that supported one or more of the 65 business activities. This experience demonstrated the feasibility of achieving consensus among business experts on one referent business model. It also demonstrated the utility of that model in evaluating legacy systems. This case provides a detailed example that business experts can bridge the gulf of ambiguous systems requirements that exists between real-world business activities and the information systems that support them

Understanding the Why, What, and How of Theories in IS Research

Researchers have emphasized theory’s pivotal importance in the information systems (IS) discipline since its inception. As in many science disciplines, IS scholars’ ability to understand and contribute to theory is an important qualification in research practice. As a discipline, we require solid foundations for why we engage with theory, what theory is for us, and how we work with theory. We synthesize and reflect on the debates on theories and theorizing in the IS discipline. In doing so, we inform (particularly new) authors about the current state of the IS discipline’s debate on theory and theorizing and help them identify opportunities in theorizing to put theory to work. We do not intend to advocate or cement that status quo we portray but rather, through informing the community about it, to support early efforts to further develop and move beyond the current state of the debate on theory and theorizing in IS research