Represenation And Economic Valuation Of Information In Lay Economic Thinking

The increasing importance of information in contemporary societies, as well as the paradoxes of information and mainly the uncertainty surrounding its value, raise several questions concerning the valuing of information and of information producers by laymen. In our studies we examined whether informational goods are undervalued, compared to material goods, by potential buyers and sellers. Also, we examined the social representations of information, which provide an insight about the lay meaning of information. Finally, we investigated whether the undervaluation of information generalizes to the remuneration of professionals producing pure information (invention) compared to those who apply this information in order to produce material goods. Results showed that, whereas informational goods are devalued compared to material goods, the remuneration of intellectual professionals producing pure information is overvalued compared to this of intellectual professionals applying this information to produce services or material goods. The investigation of the structure of the social representations of information showed that the central core of the representation of information is mainly composed of categories referring to traditional media, functions and technologies of information, while contemporary functions and technologies are less frequent or absent

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse