Connected systems in smart cities: use-cases of integration of buildings information with smart systems

Realisation of smart cities is highly dependent on innovative connections between the deployed systems in the cities. This implies that successfully deployment of individual smart systems which meet citizens’ needs, is not sufficient to make a city smart. Indeed, the smart cities require to innovate and connect establish infrastructures for the citizens and organisations. To enable connected systems in smart cities, the possibilities to exchange and integration information between different systems is essential. Construction industry is one of the domains which owns huge amount of valuable information asset. Buildings information can be utilised to create initiatives associated with various domains like, urban and infrastructure planning, maintenance/facility management, and energy monitoring. However, there are some barriers to realise these initiatives. This paper introduces and elaborates the details about three use-cases which need to utilise buildings information to present innovative smart services. The three use cases are: 1) Energy Usage Monitoring for positive energy usage district areas in Smart Cities (a use case from River City-anonymous name of the city); 2) Services for Facility Management Industry (a use-case from Estates office in Quay University); 3) Safety & risk management for buildings in 3D Hack event in Dublin. Each use-case considers various stakeholders’ perspectives. Also they include elaborated details related to the barriers and challenges associated with utilisation and integration of buildings information. This paper concludes by the detailed barriers to benefit from valuable buildings information to create innovative smart services. Further, recommendations are provided to overcome the presented challenges

Characteristics of Information Systems and Business Informatics Study Programs

Over the last decade there is an intensive discussion within the Information Systems (IS) and Informatics community about the characteristics and identity of the discipline. Simultaneously with the discussion, there is an ongoing debate on essential skills and capabilities of IS and Business Informatics graduates as well as the profile of IS programs. With this paper we recognize the need for different IS perspectives resulting in diverse study profiles. We developed a framework for structuring information systems study programs and characterized some of the differences in study programs. The results from this study are based on a survey and workshops with domain exerts, both from academia and practice. The descriptive results from the survey are presented, and show the diversity of study programs, both on master and bachelor level. As an example for an IS profile we summarize a reference structure for Business Informatics study programs, which aims to provide guidance for curriculum development and to stimulate further debate on IS curriculum development

Business Informatics: An Engineering Perspective on Information Systems

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Customer purchase behavior prediction in E-commerce: a conceptual framework and research agenda

Digital retailers are experiencing an increasing number of transactions coming from their consumers online, a consequence of the convenience in buying goods via E-commerce platforms. Such interactions compose complex behavioral patterns which can be analyzed through predictive analytics to enable businesses to understand consumer needs. In this abundance of big data and possible tools to analyze them, a systematic review of the literature is missing. Therefore, this paper presents a systematic literature review of recent research dealing with customer purchase prediction in the E-commerce context. The main contributions are a novel analytical framework and a research agenda in the field. The framework reveals three main tasks in this review, namely, the prediction of customer intents, buying sessions, and purchase decisions. Those are followed by their employed predictive methodologies and are analyzed from three perspectives. Finally, the research agenda provides major existing issues for further research in the field of purchase behavior prediction online

Tailored retrieval of health information from the web for facilitating communication and empowerment of elderly people

A patient, nowadays, acquires health information from the Web mainly through a “human-to-machine” communication process with a generic search engine. This, in turn, affects, positively or negatively, his/her empowerment level and the “human-to-human” communication process that occurs between a patient and a healthcare professional such as a doctor. A generic communication process can be modelled by considering its syntactic-technical, semantic-meaning, and pragmatic-effectiveness levels and an efficacious communication occurs when all the communication levels are fully addressed. In the case of retrieval of health information from the Web, although a generic search engine is able to work at the syntactic-technical level, the semantic and pragmatic aspects are left to the user and this can be challenging, especially for elderly people. This work presents a custom search engine, FACILE, that works at the three communication levels and allows to overcome the challenges confronted during the search process. A patient can specify his/her information requirements in a simple way and FACILE will retrieve the “right” amount of Web content in a language that he/she can easily understand. This facilitates the comprehension of the found information and positively affects the empowerment process and communication with healthcare professionals

Multi-Media and Web-based Evaluation of Design Artifacts - Syntactic, Semantic and Pragmatic Quality of Process Models

Evaluation of design artifacts is of crucial importance in design science research (DSR). A plethora of evaluation approaches and methods can be found in literature; nevertheless, little work has been done so far to investigate the relation between the evaluation strategies, methods an d techniques in DSR evaluations. Prototype implementations, together with case studies seem to be dominant and the technique of choice to evaluate, often complex artifacts. This paper goes beyond the common approach in DSR, and presents a multi-media and web-based DSR evaluation approach focussing on syntactic, semantic and pragmatic quality. We present the definition of evaluation criteria, the selection of evaluation methods and the findings and experiences gained. The results of this paper can support other design science re-search approaches concerned with the evaluation of concepts or process models

Investigating HCI challenges for designing smart environments

With the advancement of technologies related to ‘Internet of Things’, we are moving towards environments characterised by full integration and semantics. Various environments are often summarized with terms such as ‘Smart City’, ‘Smart Home’, ‘Smart Buildings’ or ‘Smart Commerce’. In the meantime, technologies and standards for interoperability have been developed. However, to realise the full potential one remaining challenge is the design, integration and interoperability of many elements into a smart environment. In order to address this challenge, researchers have proposed concepts for Information Systems Design and Enterprise Architectures. By inspecting interaction challenges -in particular activities in which Humans are involved- during the design process, we endeavour in this paper to identify key challenges for designing smart environments. In order to address the challenges we propose a conversational approach that supports the main design phases and allows professionals to interact during the design phases for smart environments

Taxonomy of smart elements for designing effective services

Smart cities use ICT to improve citizens’ quality of life. Therefore, to address the citizens’ needs and meeting the smart city’s quality factors, defining appropriate goals and objectives is paramount. However, a considerable count of services does not have a goal to respond to the smart cities’ demands. Defining stakeholders’ needs, setting consequent objectives and specifying other technical requirements happen during the design phase of the services. Therefore, there is a need to provide a view of the required smart considerations. This paper aims at introducing a taxonomy for the required elements needed to be taken into account during the design of smart services. The proposed taxonomy is evaluated using a real case study in a European smart city council. The outcome of this research contributes to defining an architecture for designing more effective services in terms of enabling responses to citizens’ concerns and meeting the smart city quality requirements

Challenges of Teaching Information Quality: Demonstrating an Adaptation of a Popular Management Game in Teaching Information Quality

Over the last years information quality has gained increasingly importance in practice as well as academia. Recently aspects of information quality are included in many Information Systems’ curricula. However, teaching aspects of information quality to students is challenging and often emphasizes merely theoretical aspects. As a consequence many graduates have a limited understanding of information quality issues and management practice. In order to help to raise the awareness of information quality aspects, we developed a teaching tool that can demonstrate the impact of poor information quality and the importance of information quality management. The tool is based on a popular management game and can show the effects of information quality on organizational decision-making