CSNET: A PROPOSAL FOR NETWORK CLEARANCE AND SETTLEMENT

I present a brief introduction to exchange-based clearance and settlement, and current practical and research problems posed by various inefficiencies that exist in this process. Then, open network protocols are reviewed to set the stage for the design of a hypothetical clearance and settlement network (CSnet). Important and desirable attributes such as security, robustness, and extensibility will be discussed. A practical networked implementation of order flow and execution, the Financial Information Exchange (FIX) protocol will be discussed since it parallels in several key areas the CSnet proposal. Further directions for study in the area will be indicated.Information Systems Working Papers Serie

Growing Out of Its Skin: Principles of the Evolution and Extension of the Internet Chess Club, 1995 to Present

The Internet Chess Club, or ICC, is a highly successful virtual gaming community. This paper examines the evolution from its 1995 inception as a pure gaming community to the present day as a successful business with over 26,000 paid members. We give a particular focus on the underlying qualities the ICC possesses in order to succeed and grow such as utilization of real-world credibility indicators (titles), a robust economic system, and mechanisms for user-contributed feature extensions. As ICC expands in scope and scale, its segmentation strategies are analyzed as well as the impact of these extensions on its business strategy. The paper also discusses a novel method of data collection in an online community; the use of a participant/observer software agent to poll the community at regular intervals at collect data as well as promote a voluntary questionnaire as part of its service to the ICC community. Data collected by the agent in its first month of operation are analyzed and discussed

Pediatric Private Practice on the National Health Information Network: The PedOne® System

The National Health Information Network (NHIN) is a federal mandate of the US Government. It involves setting the standards for interoperability and effective information technology in health care for hospitals, urgent care, private practices, insurance carriers, and other health care participants. Much attention has been paid to mixed NHIN funding outcomes of Regional Health Information Organizations (RHIOs) but here we take the different perspective of the private practice. This paper examines a Pediatric implementation, PedOne®, that is designed to deliver an intuitive and friendly environment to provide clinical data management and decision support. PedOne® interfaces to public health and internal medical knowledge bases. In an analogy to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) role in building the Internet, we focus on the running code and the physician design involvement to provide lessons learned with respect to Pediatric Electronic Health Records system evolution. The design principles we uncover can be extrapolated to other medical specialties

Visualizing Research Digital Libraries with Open Standards

Large-scale research Digital Libraries (DLs) contain a large array of potentially useful metadata. Yet, many popular DLs do not provide a convenient way to navigate the metadata or to visualize classification schema in the user session. For example, in the broad world of Management Information Systems (MIS) research, a high-level overview of MIS topics and their inter-relationships would be useful to navigate a MIS DL before zooming in on a specific article. To address this obstacle, this paper describes a prototype, the Technical Report Visualizer System (TRV), which uses a wide variety of open standards to show DL classification metadata in the navigation interface. The system captures MIS article metadata from the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) compliant arXiv e-Print archive at Cornell University. The OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is used to collect the topic metadata; the articles\u27 Association for Computing Machinery\u27s (ACM) Computing Classification System codes. We display the topic metadata in a Java hyperbolic tree and make use of XML conceptual product and implementation product standards and specifications, such as the Dublin Core and BiblioML bibliographic metadata sets, XML Topic Maps, Xalan and Xerces, to link user navigation activity to the abstracts and full text contents of the articles. We discuss the flexibility and convenience of XML standards and link this effort to related digital library visualization approaches. Keywords

The Edgar Internet Project: Web Application Development Considerations

This paper describes the implementation of World-Wide Web (WWW) access of the SEC EDGAR (Electronic Data Gathering, Archiving and Retrieval) data base. EDGAR is a large, heterogeneous financial data archive that has been available to Internet users since January 1994. It is composed of all forms filed electronically to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) by domestic publicly traded corporations and mutualfunds. We describe WWW design decisions and problems encountered in implementing a public access system to a large database. Our current applications include: an object-oriented mutual fund equity holdings database, a structured full text index search oncorporate profiles, and real-time graphical visualization of stock price and mutual fund position changes

MEDQUAL: Improving Medical Web Search over Time with Dynamic Credibility Heuristics

Performing a search on the World Wide Web (WWW) and traversing the resulting links is an adventure in which one encounters both credible and incredible web pages. Search engines, such as Google, rely on macroscopic Web topology patterns and even highly ranked 'authoritative' web sites may be a mixture of informed and uninformed opinions. Without credibility heuristics to guide the user in a maze of facts, assertions, and inferences, the Web remains an ineffective knowledge delivery platform. This report presents the design and implementation of a modular extension to the popular Google search engine, MEDQUAL, which provisions both URL and content-based heuristic credibility rules to reorder raw Google rankings in the medical domain. MEDQUAL, a software system written in Java, starts with a bootstrap configuration file which loads in basic heuristics in XML format. It then provides a subscription mechanism so users can join birds of feather specialty groups, for example Pediatrics, in order to load specialized heuristics as well. The platform features a coordination mechanism whereby information seekers can effectively become secondary authors, contributing by consensus vote additional credibility heuristics. MEDQUAL uses standard XML namespace conventions to divide opinion groups so that competing groups can be supported simultaneously. The net effect is a merger of basic and supplied heuristics so that the system continues to adapt and improve itself over time to changing web content, changing opinions, and new opinion groups. The key goal of leveraging the intelligence of a large-scale and diffuse WWW user community is met and we conclude by discussing our plans to develop MEDQUAL further and evaluate it