A conceptual model for semantically-based e-government portals

Issues of semantic interoperability and service integration for e-government portals are the domain of interest of the present paper. We propose a Conceptual Model for One-Stop e-Government Portals based on the Semantic Web Service technology. We describe our research into building the three basic ontologies and their integration with standard ontologies. The result is a project-independent reusable model. At the same time, we outline a simple methodology for applying the proposed conceptual model into a specific scenario

Unleashing the Effectiveness of Process-oriented Information Systems: Problem Analysis, Critical Success Factors, Implications

Process-oriented information systems (IS) aim at the computerized support of business processes. So far, contemporary IS have often fail to meet this goal. To better understand this drawback, to systematically identify its rationales, and to derive critical success factors for business process support, we conducted three empirical studies: an exploratory case study in the automotive domain, an online survey among 79 IT professionals, and another online survey among 70 business process management (BPM) experts. This paper summarizes the findings of these studies, puts them in relation with each other, and uses them to show that "process-orientation" is scarce and "process-awareness" is needed in IS engineering

Web Services as Product Experience Augmenters and the Implications for Requirements Engineering: A Position Paper

There is currently little insight into what requirement engineering for web services is and in which context it will be carried out. In this position paper, we investigate requirements engineering for a special kind of web services, namely web services that are used to augment the perceived value of a primary service or product that is itself not a web service. We relate requirements engineering to a common enterprise architecture pattern and derive from this a number of research questions for further study

The Freshness of Web search engines’ databases

This study measures the frequency in which search engines update their indices. Therefore, 38 websites that are updated on a daily basis were analysed within a time-span of six weeks. The analysed search engines were Google, Yahoo and MSN. We find that Google performs best overall with the most pages updated on a daily basis, but only MSN is able to update all pages within a time-span of less than 20 days. Both other engines have outliers that are quite older. In terms of indexing patterns, we find different approaches at the different engines: While MSN shows clear update patterns, Google shows some outliers and the update process of the Yahoo index seems to be quite chaotic. Implications are that the quality of different search engine indices varies and not only one engine should be used when searching for current content

How INSPIREd is NERC?

The Natural Environment Research Council (www.nerc.ac.uk) is the UK's main agency for funding and managing research, training and knowledge exchange in the environmental sciences. In 2007 NERC commissioned a consultancy to prepare an INSPIRE baseline and Road Map to enable it to be compliant with the EU INSPIRE Directive well ahead of the deadlines listed in the Directive. This study provided: • A baseline of INSPIRE readiness across NERC with respect to INSPIRE requirements for metadata, discovery, view and download services; • A description of what NERC will need to provide to fully comply with the INSPIRE Directive; • A description of the technology options that are currently envisaged to implement the INSPIRE Directive; • A Road Map to show what NERC must do to meet the INSPIRE Directive; • An estimate of resources required to implement the INSPIRE Directive. This paper outlines the findings of this study

The OMII Software – Demonstrations and Comparisons between two different deployments for Client-Server Distributed Systems

This paper describes the key elements of the OMII software and the scenarios which OMII software can be deployed to achieve distributed computing in the UK e-Science Community, where two different deployments for Client-Server distributed systems are demonstrated. Scenarios and experiments for each deployment have been described, with its advantages and disadvantages compared and analyzed. We conclude that our first deployment is more relevant for system administrators or developers, and the second deployment is more suitable for users’ perspective which they can send and check job status for hundred job submissions