A characteristics framework for Semantic Information Systems Standards

Semantic Information Systems (IS) Standards play a critical role in the development of the networked economy. While their importance is undoubted by all stakeholders—such as businesses, policy makers, researchers, developers—the current state of research leaves a number of questions unaddressed. Terminological confusion exists around the notions of “business semantics”, “business-to-business interoperability”, and “interoperability standards” amongst others. And, moreover, a comprehensive understanding about the characteristics of Semantic IS Standards is missing. The paper addresses this gap in literature by developing a characteristics framework for Semantic IS Standards. Two case studies are used to check the applicability of the framework in a “real-life” context. The framework lays the foundation for future research in an important field of the IS discipline and supports practitioners in their efforts to analyze, compare, and evaluate Semantic IS Standard

Do semantic standards lack quality? : a survey among 34 semantic standards

The adoption of standards to improve interoperability in the automotive, aerospace, shipbuilding and other sectors could save billions. While interoperability standards have been created for a number of industries, problems persist, suggesting a lack of quality of the standards themselves. The issue of semantic standard quality is not often addressed. In this research we take a closer look at the quality of semantics standards, development processes, and survey the current state of the quality of semantic standards by means of a questionnaire that was sent to standards developers. This survey looked at 34 semantic standards, and it shows that the quality of semantic standards for inter-organizational interoperability can be improved. Improved standards may advance interoperability in networked business. Improvement of semantic standards requires transparency of their quality. Although many semantic standard development organisations already have quality assurance in place, this research shows that they could benefit from a quality measuring instrument

Ideas for action (I4A): An experiential learning competition that promotes youth entrepreneurial ventures to finance and implement the 2030 agenda

[No abstract available

Knowledge transfer: An information theory perspective

© 2017 The OR Society. Personalization and codification are two dominant knowledge transfer (KT) mechanisms found in organizations and organizational networks. This paper proposes a theoretical model of KT that explains organizations' choice of KT mechanisms in terms of the tacitness of knowledge being shared and the corresponding information content. Shannon's entropy, an information theoretical concept, has been used to define the constructs of tacitness and information content and explain their influence on the choice of the corresponding KT mechanisms. Contributions of the paper include (a) use of information content as a predictor of the choice of KT mechanisms, (b) development of an expression for tacitness, and an intuitive explanation of the tacit-explicit continuum, (c) characterization of product variety in terms of information content, and (d) development of a KT theoretical model that can be operationalized for predicting the choice of KT mechanisms in real-life situations