Aggregation and the Role of Trusted Third Parties in SME E-Business Engagement: A Regional Policy Issue

YesIt is against the background of low engagement by SMEs in e-business that this paper seeks to highlight the potential importance of aggregation and of the role of trusted third parties in facilitating higher levels of involvement. The paper is based on an ongoing SME e-business research programme and reports on some recent research on SMEs that were using high complexity e-business applications and explores the extent to which the research findings could address the core concern of low engagement. This qualitative case study based research includes analysis of data collected from 13 community intermediaries, acting as trusted third parties. It concludes that the role of community intermediaries appears to be central to the adoption of critical e-aggregation applications provided by service providers. For policymakers, this important role of critical e-aggregation applications in facilitating e-business engagement by SMEs has emerged as part of this research but there is limited evidence of policy initiatives that reflect this

Metadata Architecture for Digital Libraries: Conceptual framework for Indian Digital Libraries

This paper describes approach of development of Metadata solution for digital library architecture for resource description and retrieval. This deals with the concept of Metadata [2], the different Metadata standards (Dublin core in particular [5]), Digital library environment, computer network capabilities etc. This paper also discusses two of the Digital Library architecture protocols, for resource description and retrieval. They are STARTS (Stanford Protocol Proposal for Internet Retrieval and Search) [8] and SODA (Smart Objects and Dump Archives)[13] architecture to arrive at a possible protocol that would help to build Indian Digital Libraries [5]. While proposing the new architecture the existing Indian environment with respect to information sources and user's query of the information sources [5.1], which are feasible for launch of this protocol for information processing and retrieval has been dealt with. This is a pilot study which the author has done while doing his Fulbright fellowship in the College of Library Information Studies, University of Maryland, College Park, MD during 1999-2000

A Taxonomy of Data Grids for Distributed Data Sharing, Management and Processing

Data Grids have been adopted as the platform for scientific communities that need to share, access, transport, process and manage large data collections distributed worldwide. They combine high-end computing technologies with high-performance networking and wide-area storage management techniques. In this paper, we discuss the key concepts behind Data Grids and compare them with other data sharing and distribution paradigms such as content delivery networks, peer-to-peer networks and distributed databases. We then provide comprehensive taxonomies that cover various aspects of architecture, data transportation, data replication and resource allocation and scheduling. Finally, we map the proposed taxonomy to various Data Grid systems not only to validate the taxonomy but also to identify areas for future exploration. Through this taxonomy, we aim to categorise existing systems to better understand their goals and their methodology. This would help evaluate their applicability for solving similar problems. This taxonomy also provides a "gap analysis" of this area through which researchers can potentially identify new issues for investigation. Finally, we hope that the proposed taxonomy and mapping also helps to provide an easy way for new practitioners to understand this complex area of research.Comment: 46 pages, 16 figures, Technical Repor

Service-Relationship Programming Framework for the Social IoT

We argue that for a true realization of innovative programming opportunities for smart spaces, the developers should be equipped with informative tools that assist them in building domain-related applications. Such tools should utilize the services offered by the space's smart things and consider the different relationships that may tie these services opportunistically to build applications. In this paper, we utilize our Inter-thing relationships programming framework to present a distributed programming ecosystem. The framework broadens the restricted set of thing-level relationships of the evolving social IoT paradigm with a set of service-level relationships. Such relationships provide guidance into how services belonging to different things can be combined to build meaningful applications. We also present a uniform way of describing the thing services and the service-level relationships along with new capabilities for the things to dynamically generate their own services, formulate the corresponding programmable interfaces (APIs) and create an ad-hoc network of socially related smart things at runtime. We then present the semantic rules that guide the establishment of IoT applications and finally demonstrate the features of the framework through a proof-of-concept application

The essence of P2P: A reference architecture for overlay networks

The success of the P2P idea has created a huge diversity of approaches, among which overlay networks, for example, Gnutella, Kazaa, Chord, Pastry, Tapestry, P-Grid, or DKS, have received specific attention from both developers and researchers. A wide variety of algorithms, data structures, and architectures have been proposed. The terminologies and abstractions used, however, have become quite inconsistent since the P2P paradigm has attracted people from many different communities, e.g., networking, databases, distributed systems, graph theory, complexity theory, biology, etc. In this paper we propose a reference model for overlay networks which is capable of modeling different approaches in this domain in a generic manner. It is intended to allow researchers and users to assess the properties of concrete systems, to establish a common vocabulary for scientific discussion, to facilitate the qualitative comparison of the systems, and to serve as the basis for defining a standardized API to make overlay networks interoperable