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Mini Track Introduction Some years ago, Online Communities were considered one of the most promising innovations resulting from the Internet revolution. Community building and community development were proclaimed to be a key success... more
Mini Track Introduction Some years ago, Online Communities were considered one of the most promising innovations resulting from the Internet revolution. Community building and community development were proclaimed to be a key success factor for the digital enterprise. As a result, Internet ventures tried to artificially build and foster Online Communities in different forms ? as part of online shops, portal sites or B2B platforms, or as design, relationship or gaming communities. At the same time research was mainly related to topics as for example how to build a community and how to gain critical mass and market shares as soon as possible.
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This research aims at providing a quantitative benefits assessment of enhancing the visibility in global supply chains. In particular, we describe how we model physical and information processes in a global maritime supply chain, and how... more
This research aims at providing a quantitative benefits assessment of enhancing the visibility in global supply chains. In particular, we describe how we model physical and information processes in a global maritime supply chain, and how delays propagate under different information scenarios. We describe how the model logic is validated in the context of a large scale project in which
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Many domains are characterized by agents that interact with each other in accordance with common rules or norms. In international trade, a trading network may include a variety of entities (e.g., software, organizations and people) that... more
Many domains are characterized by agents that interact with each other in accordance with common rules or norms. In international trade, a trading network may include a variety of entities (e.g., software, organizations and people) that are largely autonomous, geographically distributed, and heterogeneous in terms of their operating environment, culture, social capital, and goals. In this context, agents represent real interests and real entities, i.e., different agents have different owners, goals, interests, and preconditions for collaboration. For example, importers are motivated by profit and quality of products, while customs authorities are motivated by safety and security concerns. At any given moment, most agents will be conditioned by different regulations and norms, originating from different institutional contexts.
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The Beer Living Lab was the first of a series of living labs established to analyse and improve complex cross-border trade and logistics challenges using innovative information technology. Unlike stable inter-firm networks where roles are... more
The Beer Living Lab was the first of a series of living labs established to analyse and improve complex cross-border trade and logistics challenges using innovative information technology. Unlike stable inter-firm networks where roles are formal and explicit, role taking and role assigning in the Beer Living Lab was highly dynamic. Although project deliverables were formally assigned, in practice responsibilities emerged as a result of actors’ own initiative or as a result of negotiation and sense-making. Even leadership behaviour shifted throughout the various stages of the initiative. The practice of knowledge broking and cultivating a close working relationship with the operational manager emerged as crucial for creating and sustaining the social network which in turn stabilised the hybrid network organisation. We discover (yet again) the key practices of knowledge brokers and the necessity for social involvement in overcoming discontinuities within organisation networks.
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Ontology alignment is a fundamental task to reconcile the heterogeneity among various information systems using distinct information sources. The evolutionary algorithms (EAs) have been already considered as the primary strategy to... more
Ontology alignment is a fundamental task to reconcile the heterogeneity among various information systems using distinct information sources. The evolutionary algorithms (EAs) have been already considered as the primary strategy to develop an ontology alignment system. However, such systems have two significant drawbacks: they either need a ground truth that is often unavailable, or they utilize the population-based EAs in a way that they require massive computation and memory. This article presents a new ontology alignment system, called SANOM, which uses the well-known simulated annealing as the principal technique to find the mappings between two given ontologies while no ground truth is available. In contrast to population-based EAs, the simulated annealing need not generate populations, which makes it significantly swift and memory-efficient for the ontology alignment problem. This article models the ontology alignment problem as optimizing the fitness of a state whose optimum ...
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ABSTRACT
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Many researchers observe that trust is of importance in online transactions. Most of them have focussed on the trust a buyer has in a seller. In an online C2C auction market, such as eBay, trust in the organization that facilitates the... more
Many researchers observe that trust is of importance in online transactions. Most of them have focussed on the trust a buyer has in a seller. In an online C2C auction market, such as eBay, trust in the organization that facilitates the auction is an additional trust relationship that is of importance for the outcome of the transactions. Here we investigate which types of trust relationships are present in an online C2C auction market and which differences exist between these relationships. The focus lies on situations of initial trust, in which parties have not gained experience with each other yet. We present a model of antecedents of initial trust that can be used to analyze these different types of trust relationships. These antecedents are: reputation, formal control structures, disposition to trust and communication.
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In global supply chains, a multitude of public and private organizations collaborate to reach the collective goal of transporting goods from the seller to the buyer. Given the dynamicity of global supply chains it is hard to predict which... more
In global supply chains, a multitude of public and private organizations collaborate to reach the collective goal of transporting goods from the seller to the buyer. Given the dynamicity of global supply chains it is hard to predict which information is needed by whom at which point in time which often causes service delivery delays. Integrating relevant information, processes and services prevents disruptions in the supply chain and deterioration in service provisioning caused by missing information required for processes that need to be executed to supply services. In this paper, an ontology-based, event-driven architecture is designed for integrating information, processes and services that acts as a mechanism to coordinate service delivery in a global supply chain. The architecture is evaluated in the context of a global supply chain of plastic toys. This illustrates how the events facilitated by the architecture enable the availability of information in time which positively in...
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ABSTRACT Multi-sided platforms (MSPs) represent an active area in economics and electronic markets, but are given scant attention in digital government research. While the body of knowledge on commercial MSPs is steadily growing, little... more
ABSTRACT Multi-sided platforms (MSPs) represent an active area in economics and electronic markets, but are given scant attention in digital government research. While the body of knowledge on commercial MSPs is steadily growing, little empirical substantiation exists about the series of design choices that stakeholders conduct in order to realize information infrastructures in a public-private setting. This paper investigates the barriers and decisions that influence the public-private design of MSPs. Two public-private initiatives are investigated: (1) standard business reporting and (2) an international logistic information platform. The barriers and decisions in the current portrayal of both cases are analysed on two aspects: (1) the platform governance and (2) the information infrastructure. Research data is collected through knowledge retention projects in which researchers and practitioners reflect on design choices. We found that rather than developing an information infrastructure and demanding that businesses use it, government agencies detach from the classical approach and actively tempt businesses to partner in achieving long-term goals. A cross-case comparison shows that in the public-private setting government agencies need to employ a careful mix of instruments (i.e., business incentives, legislation and standard development) in order to realise successful information infrastructures. Both government agencies and businesses are still learning in terms of employing MSPs for realising change.
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... This requires that patients know enough about the available healthcare services and healthcare providers to ... On the right you find the supply side, with representations of the basic service components ... part of the case study... more
... This requires that patients know enough about the available healthcare services and healthcare providers to ... On the right you find the supply side, with representations of the basic service components ... part of the case study seems to indicate, that norm frames do indeed provide ...
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In multi-agent systems, norms are used to regulate agents' behavior so that the objectives of the systems can be realized in a predictable way. Therefore, it is important to check whether agents can comply with the norms imposed on... more
In multi-agent systems, norms are used to regulate agents' behavior so that the objectives of the systems can be realized in a predictable way. Therefore, it is important to check whether agents can comply with the norms imposed on them. However, when norms are interrelated, verification of norm compliance cannot be achieved by checking compliance of each norm separately as done traditionally. To this effect, this extended abstract introduces an approach which first models a set of interrelated norms as Norm Nets, and then map them to Colored Petri Nets (CPNs), by which compliance checking of both individual agents' behavior and the collective behavior of the system can be performed automatically. With CPNs, it is also possible to identify under which conditions the norms can be complied with.
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Secure and accurate transactions are vital to any large-scale business system in order to guarantee the reliability of the system to stakeholders in both the public and private sectors. In supply chain systems, however, a variety of... more
Secure and accurate transactions are vital to any large-scale business system in order to guarantee the reliability of the system to stakeholders in both the public and private sectors. In supply chain systems, however, a variety of information security shortcomings is currently occurring in several processes, for example, related to data confidentiality. The Data Pipeline principle has been proposed to improve the security and quality of supply chain information systems. In a first elaboration, the Distributed Trust Backbone (DTB) model was designed. The DTB consists of a set of core components and protocols having the aim to enable secure information exchange. Next, a prototype has been implemented using computer systems available in three countries spread over the world. In order to test the system, we performed a case study in which data confidentiality appeared to be a fundamental requirement. In this paper, we describe our case study and argue that supply chain transactions can successfully be concealed using the DTB model. This concerns one of the fundamental requirement of secure information exchange along the international supply chain.
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Manufacturers operating in international markets are faced with complex rules and regulations that must be complied with in order to trade successfully. A general phenomenon among international enterprises is that, when they are... more
Manufacturers operating in international markets are faced with complex rules and regulations that must be complied with in order to trade successfully. A general phenomenon among international enterprises is that, when they are conducting business across borders, their internal information systems fail to interface well with systems or platforms built specially for compliance reports. This leads to inventory mismatch and results in other types of problems, such as delay of goods delivery or incorrect duty payment. One of the main difficulties in fully integrating information systems arises from the highly flexible and volatile nature of manufacturing processes, which would need highly customizable and adaptive information systems. Currently, there is a lack of systematic method to monitor compliance within flexible multinational manufacturing processes and supply chains. Moreover, improper operations could hamper compliance even normal business processes. In order to have well inte...
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Collaborative networks comprising both public and private organisations are seen as the contemporary form of organising public action. However, in these networks, public organisations and private organisations bring in different... more
Collaborative networks comprising both public and private organisations are seen as the contemporary form of organising public action. However, in these networks, public organisations and private organisations bring in different approaches to their operations and interactions with other parties. These different approaches provide different and sometimes competing directions for the coordination of public-private collaborations. In this paper, we discuss the background of public-private collaboration and conduct an explorative case study in which innovation in data sharing between multiple stakeholders in global trade networks leads to issues in the functionality on the boundary between public and private data. A shift in boundaries and a higher dependence on other actors is the result of a digital infrastructure innovation with both public and private components. We found that hierarchical and market governance modes are both present and offer competing directions for operating on the public-private boundary. The case study results show the need for a public-private governance approach to deal with the issues that arise at the boundary between the two sectors. A major issue there is how public or community services that are provided by a private party can be upheld while at the same time providing a revenue model for the businesses involved.