Islamic leadership as a mechanism to achieve Sustainable competitive advantage in small and medium enterprises A case study of small and medium enterprises in the private industrial sector in Jijel Province - Algeria

 يتناول هذا المقال موضوع القيادة الإسلامية كآلية لتحقيق الميزة التنافسية المستمرة بالمؤسسات الصغيرة والمتوسطة، حيث رغم أنّ القيادة الإسلامية كانت تطبّق في المجال العسكري أو في مجال تسيير أمور الدولة أو الخلافة إلاّ أنّ تحليلنا لمقوّماتها وصفات القادة فيها وخاصّة رسولنا الكريم وخلفائه الراشدين وجدنا أنّه يمكن إسقاط كلّ هذا على القادة بالمؤسسات، وأنّ هذا النمط القيادي يدمج جميع ايجابيات الأنماط القيادية الإدارية ويتخلّص من سلبياتها وهذا ما يدخل في إطار الإعجاز العلمي في القرآن الكريم والسنّة النبوية الذي استفادت منهم تقريبا جميع المجالات كالطب وعلم الفلك والبيولوجيا وغيرها في حين نجدها تكاد تكون منعدمة في المجال الإداري، ولهذا جاءت دراستنا هذه تحاول معرفة مدى قدرة هذا النمط القيادي في تحقيق ميزة تنافسية مستمرة بالمؤسسّات الصغيرة والمتوسطة في القطاع الصناعي الخاص بولاية جيجل، خاصّة إذا عرفنا بأنّ أغلب المؤسسات الصغيرة والمتوسطة لا تعمّر كثيرا نتيجة عدم قدرتها على المنافسة ومواكبة التطوّرات الحاصلة في البيئة.This article studies the subject of Islamic leadership as a mechanism to achieve ongoing competitive advantage in SMEs, despite the fact that the Islamic leadership was applied in the military field or in state affairs conduct, however, our analysis of the merits and qualities of leaders where, especially Holy Prophet and his successors we found that it can be drop all this on the leaders of companies, and that this type of leadership that integrates all the occidental positives leadership styles and get rid of its negatives and that is what is part of the scientific miracles of the Holy Quran and the Sunnah, which benefited them almost all fields such as medicine, astronomy, biology and other while we find that it is null in the management area, this study is trying to determine the ability of this type of leadership in achieving a sustainable competitive advantage for SMEs in the private industrial sector in County of Jijel, especially that the most of the small and medium enterprises do not live too much as a result of their inability to compete and keep up with environment developments

A Graph-Based Web Services Discovery Framework for IoT EcoSystem

Nowadays, the Internet of Things (IoT) represents an important topic and research domain with multiple objectives. However, most IoTs communicate poorly across the multitude of network interfaces. It should be preferably used a single universal application layer protocol for the devices and services interconnection, regardless of how they are physically connected. The IoT paradigm boosts the device connectivity and the user accessibility benefits of services introduced within the network of connected objects associated with a context-awareness. Within this frame of reference, Web service is the appropriate technological approach to exhibit a set of related IoT functionalities loosely coupled with other services discovered or composed through the Web. In this work, we consider the heterogeneity of connecting technologies for IoT and the applications and devices integration in a single interoperable framework as a research objective. With this in mind, we introduce a five layers multigraph model for Web Services discovery and recommendation, and we address Web services-based applications for IoT data integration. The launched service discovery process permits the interaction between the user/application and the IoT environment. In this context, the choice of suitable services represents a challenge that covers the functionality and the required quality to combine composite services, namely mashups for IoT data management and interconnection. For proof of concept, we test a RESTful Web Services framework as an experimental platform to animate a graph-based approach for dynamic IoT services discovery. We develop a recommender system that performs graph analytics to produce a set of services according to the user's request. The quality of the recommendation process is evaluated by analyzing the correlation of user satisfaction

Bio-inspired surface texture modification as a viable feature of future aquatic antifouling strategies: a review

The imitation of natural systems to produce effective antifouling materials is often referred to as “biomimetics”. The world of biomimetics is a multidisciplinary one, needing careful understanding of “biological structures”, processes and principles of various organisms found in nature and based on this, designing nanodevices and nanomaterials that are of commercial interest to industry. Looking to the marine environment for bioinspired surfaces offers researchers a wealth of topographies to explore. Particular attention has been given to the evaluation of textures based on marine organisms tested in either the laboratory or the field. The findings of the review relate to the numbers of studies on textured surfaces demonstrating antifouling potential which are significant. However, many of these are only tested in the laboratory, where it is acknowledged a very different response to fouling is observed

WSMO-Lite and hRESTS: lightweight semantic annotations for Web services and RESTful APIs

Service-oriented computing has brought special attention to service description, especially in connection with semantic technologies. The expected proliferation of publicly accessible services can benefit greatly from tool support and automation, both of which are the focus of Semantic Web Service (SWS) frameworks that especially address service discovery, composition and execution. As the first SWS standard, in 2007 the World Wide Web Consortium produced a lightweight bottom-up specification called SAWSDL for adding semantic annotations to WSDL service descriptions. Building on SAWSDL, this article presents WSMO-Lite, a lightweight ontology of Web service semantics that distinguishes four semantic aspects of services: function, behavior, information model, and nonfunctional properties, which together form a basis for semantic automation. With the WSMO-Lite ontology, SAWSDL descriptions enable semantic automation beyond simple input/output matchmaking that is supported by SAWSDL itself. Further, to broaden the reach of WSMO-Lite and SAWSDL tools to the increasingly common RESTful services, the article adds hRESTS and MicroWSMO, two HTML microformats that mirror WSDL and SAWSDL in the documentation of RESTful services, enabling combining RESTful services with WSDL-based ones in a single semantic framework. To demonstrate the feasibility and versatility of this approach, the article presents common algorithms for Web service discovery and composition adapted to WSMO-Lite

Web services discovery and recommendation

Le Web est devenu une plateforme universelle d’hébergement d'applications hétérogènes. Dans ce contexte, les services Web se sont imposés comme une technologie clé pour permettre l’interaction entre diverses applications. Les technologies standards proposées autour des services Web permettent la programmation, plutôt manuelle, de ces applications. Pour favoriser une programmation automatique à base de services web, un problème majeur se pose : celui de leur découverte. Plusieurs approches adressant ce problème ont été proposées dans la littérature. L’objectif de cette thèse est d’améliorer le processus de découverte de services en exploitant trois pistes de recherche. La première consiste à proposer une approche de découverte qui combine plusieurs techniques de matching. La deuxième se base sur une validation des services retournés par un processus de découverte automatique en se basant sur les compétences utilisateurs. Ces approches ne prennent pas en considération l’évolution de services dans le temps et les préférences des utilisateurs. Pour remédier à ces lacunes plusieurs approches incorporent des techniques de recommandation. La majorité d'entre eux sont basées sur les évaluations des propriétés de QdS. Pratiquement, ces évaluations sont rarement disponibles. D’autres systèmes exploitent les relations de confiance. Ces relations sont établies en se basant sur les évaluations de services. Or, invoquant le même service ne signifie pas obligatoirement avoir les mêmes préférences. D’où, nous proposons, l’exploitation des relations d’intérêts entre les utilisateurs pour recommander des services. L’approche s’appuie sur une modélisation orientée base de données graphes.The Web has become an universal platform for content hosting and distributed heterogeneous applications that can be accessed manually or automatically. In this context, Web services have established themselves as a key technology for deploying interactions across applications. The standard Web services technologies allow and facilitate the manual programming of these applications. To promote automatic programming based on Web services, a major problem arises : that of their discovery. Several approaches addressing this problem have been proposed in the literature. The aim of this thesis is to improve the Web services discovery process. We proposed three approaches. We proposed a Web services discovery approach that combines several matching techniques. The second consists on the validation of the services returned by an automatic process of discovery using users’ competencies. These approaches do not take into account the evolution of services over time and user preferences. To address these shortcomings, several approaches incorporate referral techniques to assist the discovery process. A large majority of these approaches are based on assessments of QoS properties. In practice, these assessments are rarely available. In other systems, trust relationships between users and services are used. These relationships are established based on invocations evaluations of similar services. However, invoking the same service do not necessarily mean having the same preferences. Hence, we propose, in our third approach, the use of the relations of interest between users to recommend services. The approach relies on modeling services’ ecosystem by database graphs

A Multigraph for RESTful Services Discovery in IoT Ecosystem

International audienceIoT research domain is an important topic with objective to overcome the heterogeneity of proprietary technologies as to enable the integration of applications and devices in a single interoperable framework. In this paper, we address Web Services for IoT/WoT application. We describe a five layers multigraph for Web service discovery, recommendation and composition in a REST architecture for IoT/WoT data management

A Graph-Based Web Services Discovery Framework for IoT EcoSystem

International audienceNowadays, the Internet of Things (IoT) represents an important topic and research domain with multiple objectives. However, most IoTs communicate poorly across the multitude of network interfaces. It should be preferably used a single universal application layer protocol for the devices and services interconnection, regardless of how they are physically connected. The IoT paradigm boosts the device connectivity and the user accessibility benefits of services introduced within the network of connected objects associated with a context-awareness. Web service is the appropriate technological approach to exhibit a set of related IoT functionalities loosely coupled with other services discovered or composed through the Web. In this work, we consider the heterogeneity of connecting technologies for IoT and the applications and devices integration in a single interoperable framework as a research objective. With this in mind, we introduce a five layers multigraph model for Web Services discovery and recommendation, and we address Web services-based applications for IoT data integration. The launched service discovery process permits the interaction between the user/application and the IoT environment. In this context, the choice of suitable services represents a challenge that covers the functionality and the required quality to combine composite services, namely mashups for IoT data management and interconnection. We test a RESTful Web Services framework as an experimental platform to animate a graph-based approach for dynamic IoT services discovery for proof of concept. We develop a recommender system that performs graph analytics to produce a set of services according to the user's request. The quality of the recommendation process is evaluated by analyzing the correlation of user satisfaction

From a Web Services Catalog to a Linked Ecosystem of Services

International audienceIn this paper, we present a Linked ecosystem of Web services where both Web services, mashups and users are represented as a multigraph structure. For illustration and experimental purposes, a graph has been constructed, in gathering different data from ProgrammableWeb. The graph is stored in a Neo4J graph database and serves as a repository for real collection of data for achieving services/mashups discovery, selection and recommendation

From a Web Services Catalog to a Linked Ecosystem of Services

International audience—In this paper, we present a Linked ecosystem of Web services where both Web services, mashups and users are represented as a multigraph structure. For illustration and experimental purposes, a graph has been constructed , in gathering different data from ProgrammableWeb. The graph is stored in a Neo4J graph database and serves as a repository for real collection of data for achieving services/mashups discovery, selection and recommendation

Leveraging Track Relationships for Web Service Recommendation

International audienceExisting Web services recommendation approaches are based on usage statistics or QoS properties, leaving aside the evolution of the services' ecosystem. These approaches do not always capture new or more recent users' preferences resulting in recommendations with possibly obsolete or less relevant services. In this paper, we describe a novel Web services recommendation approach where the services' ecosystem is represented as a heterogeneous multi-graph, and edges may have different semantics. The recommendation process relies on data mining techniques to suggest services "of interest" to a user