International Journal of Web Engineering and Technology http://www.inderscience.com/browse/index.php?journalID=48&year=2011&vol=6&issue=4 Inderscience Publishers Ltd en-uk International Journal of Web Engineering and Technology 1476-1289 1741-9212 © 2011 Inderscience Publishers Ltd editor@inderscience.com https://www.inderscience.com/images/files/coverImgs/ijwet_scoverijwet.gif http://www.inderscience.com/browse/index.php?journalID=48&year=2011&vol=6&issue=4 http://www.inderscience.com/link.php?id=43436 Marketing research has identified several benefits of dynamic pricing strategies in the retail industry. However, today's retailers are limited to apply them in real-time to customer needs as corresponding pricing services provided by smart product infrastructures have not been adopted so far. In addition, dynamic pricing strategies rely on a business service ecosystem of retailers, suppliers, customers and regulatory bodies and thus, interoperability is required. Because unprecedented, our objectives are therefore to propose, implement and evaluate a design model for pricing services that rely on explicit semantics and rules, denoted as knowledge-based pricing services (KPSs). In this work, we propose a design model for KPSs and empirically evaluate their utility from a customer perspective with the help of a web-based application. We finally draw implications for business models in the retail industry and discuss tools that already exist to adopt KPSs in the near future. A design model for knowledge-based pricing services in the retail industry
Tobias Kowatsch; Wolfgang Maass
International Journal of Web Engineering and Technology, Vol. 6, No. 4 (2011) pp. 302 - 319
Marketing research has identified several benefits of dynamic pricing strategies in the retail industry. However, today's retailers are limited to apply them in real-time to customer needs as corresponding pricing services provided by smart product infrastructures have not been adopted so far. In addition, dynamic pricing strategies rely on a business service ecosystem of retailers, suppliers, customers and regulatory bodies and thus, interoperability is required. Because unprecedented, our objectives are therefore to propose, implement and evaluate a design model for pricing services that rely on explicit semantics and rules, denoted as knowledge-based pricing services (KPSs). In this work, we propose a design model for KPSs and empirically evaluate their utility from a customer perspective with the help of a web-based application. We finally draw implications for business models in the retail industry and discuss tools that already exist to adopt KPSs in the near future.

]]> 10.1504/IJWET.2011.043436 International Journal of Web Engineering and Technology, Vol. 6, No. 4 (2011) pp. 302 - 319 Tobias Kowatsch; Wolfgang Maass Institute of Technology Management, University of St. Gallen (ITEM-HSG), Dufourstrasse 40a, 9000 St. Gallen, Switzerland. ' Institute of Technology Management, University of St. Gallen (ITEM-HSG), Dufourstrasse 40a, 9000 St. Gallen, Switzerland; Research Center for Intelligent Media, Hochschule Furtwangen University (RCIM-HFU), Robert-Gerwig-Platz 1, 78120 Furtwangen, Germany pricing services knowledge-based design KBD retail industry business ecosystems operational agility interoperability business modelling semantic services ontologies web-based information systems adoption diffusion empirical study experiment retailing. 2011-10-29T23:20:50-05:00 6 4 302 319 2011-10-29T23:20:50-05:00 http://www.inderscience.com/link.php?id=43437 Pursuing and achieving service innovation is of utmost importance for firms operating in technology- and knowledge-intensive sectors. The lack of market consolidation combined with the environment uncertainty due to both market volatility and technology unpredictability require the formation of partnerships to produce innovation in ever-shorter service life cycles. Recent research in partnerships has suggested that some governance structures are inherently more likely than others to be associated with high opportunity to cheat, obtain new competence, adjust to changing environment conditions, and finally expand. The present study merged these theoretical insights into a general model of structuring and tested it with data from 99 strategic partnerships, 65 of which aimed at service innovation, in the Greek information and communication technology market. The empirical findings generally supported the proposed hypotheses, however, suggesting the need for a greater focus on transaction costs and real options arguments in the study of service innovation partnerships. Strategic objectives affecting the structure of service innovation partnerships in technology- and knowledge-intensive sectors
Adamantia Pateli
International Journal of Web Engineering and Technology, Vol. 6, No. 4 (2011) pp. 320 - 334
Pursuing and achieving service innovation is of utmost importance for firms operating in technology- and knowledge-intensive sectors. The lack of market consolidation combined with the environment uncertainty due to both market volatility and technology unpredictability require the formation of partnerships to produce innovation in ever-shorter service life cycles. Recent research in partnerships has suggested that some governance structures are inherently more likely than others to be associated with high opportunity to cheat, obtain new competence, adjust to changing environment conditions, and finally expand. The present study merged these theoretical insights into a general model of structuring and tested it with data from 99 strategic partnerships, 65 of which aimed at service innovation, in the Greek information and communication technology market. The empirical findings generally supported the proposed hypotheses, however, suggesting the need for a greater focus on transaction costs and real options arguments in the study of service innovation partnerships.

]]> 10.1504/IJWET.2011.043437 International Journal of Web Engineering and Technology, Vol. 6, No. 4 (2011) pp. 320 - 334 Adamantia Pateli Department of Informatics, Ionian University, 7 Tsirigoti Square, 49100, Corfu, Greece governance structure strategic objective service innovation partnerships high technology knowledge-intensive sectors transaction costs real options Greece technology-intensive sectors high tech firms ICT market. 2011-10-29T23:20:50-05:00 6 4 320 334 2011-10-29T23:20:50-05:00 http://www.inderscience.com/link.php?id=43438 Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is designed to enable integration of heterogeneous business components, and thus is argued to improve enterprise evolution and agility. In order to identify service-oriented system evolution taxonomy, it is suggested to build on complex adaptive systems (CAS) theory that interprets phenomenon of evolution and emergence of new properties. This required a survey of service-oriented system design and development techniques and principles, and their mapping to CAS evolutionary principles. Based on this analysis, the paper identifies four major categories of service-oriented system evolution: a) service structural properties, e.g., flexibility of service, loose coupling, re-usability, etc.; b) enterprise enabling factors, e.g., enterprise architecture, organisation structure and management style; c) evolution dynamics, e.g., interactions within the enterprise and with users, prototyping, iterative and incremental development in SOA realisation, etc.; d) controlling factors, e.g., continuous reflection, learning and adjustment supported by formalised standards in SOA programming, SOA quality attributes and SOA governance techniques. This led to deriving a process model utilising these four categories to enable service-oriented system evolution. Metrics are suggested to benchmark system structural properties and controlling factors, including SOA flexibility, SOA quality attributes and SOA governance to ensure sustainable evolution and avoiding disordered results in response to change. Service-oriented system evolution taxonomy and metrics derived from complex adaptive systems theory
Ghada Alaa
International Journal of Web Engineering and Technology, Vol. 6, No. 4 (2011) pp. 335 - 353
Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is designed to enable integration of heterogeneous business components, and thus is argued to improve enterprise evolution and agility. In order to identify service-oriented system evolution taxonomy, it is suggested to build on complex adaptive systems (CAS) theory that interprets phenomenon of evolution and emergence of new properties. This required a survey of service-oriented system design and development techniques and principles, and their mapping to CAS evolutionary principles. Based on this analysis, the paper identifies four major categories of service-oriented system evolution: a) service structural properties, e.g., flexibility of service, loose coupling, re-usability, etc.; b) enterprise enabling factors, e.g., enterprise architecture, organisation structure and management style; c) evolution dynamics, e.g., interactions within the enterprise and with users, prototyping, iterative and incremental development in SOA realisation, etc.; d) controlling factors, e.g., continuous reflection, learning and adjustment supported by formalised standards in SOA programming, SOA quality attributes and SOA governance techniques. This led to deriving a process model utilising these four categories to enable service-oriented system evolution. Metrics are suggested to benchmark system structural properties and controlling factors, including SOA flexibility, SOA quality attributes and SOA governance to ensure sustainable evolution and avoiding disordered results in response to change.

]]> 10.1504/IJWET.2011.043438 International Journal of Web Engineering and Technology, Vol. 6, No. 4 (2011) pp. 335 - 353 Ghada Alaa Faculty of Informatics and Computer Science, British University in Egypt, P.O. Box 43, Suez Desert Road, El Sherouk City, 11837, Egypt service-oriented architecture SOA evolution taxonomy metrics process modelling complex adaptive systems CAS web engineering. 2011-10-29T23:20:50-05:00 6 4 335 353 2011-10-29T23:20:50-05:00 http://www.inderscience.com/link.php?id=43440 The past decade has witnessed a steady growth of open source software usage in industry and academia, leading to a complex ecosystem of projects. Web and subsequently geographical information systems have become prominent technologies, widely adopted in diverse domains. Within this context, we developed an open source web platform for interoperable GIServices. In order to implement this architecture, 14 projects were selected and analysed, including the client-side libraries and the server-side components. Although other surveys have been conducted in this area, little feedback has been formally obtained from the users and developers concerning their opinion of these tools. A questionnaire was designed to obtain responses from the relevant online communities about a given set of characteristics. This article describes the technologies and reports the results of the survey, providing first-hand information about open source web and geospatial tools. A comparison of open source geospatial technologies for web mapping
Andrea Ballatore; Ali Tahir; Gavin McArdle; Michela Bertolotto
International Journal of Web Engineering and Technology, Vol. 6, No. 4 (2011) pp. 354 - 374
The past decade has witnessed a steady growth of open source software usage in industry and academia, leading to a complex ecosystem of projects. Web and subsequently geographical information systems have become prominent technologies, widely adopted in diverse domains. Within this context, we developed an open source web platform for interoperable GIServices. In order to implement this architecture, 14 projects were selected and analysed, including the client-side libraries and the server-side components. Although other surveys have been conducted in this area, little feedback has been formally obtained from the users and developers concerning their opinion of these tools. A questionnaire was designed to obtain responses from the relevant online communities about a given set of characteristics. This article describes the technologies and reports the results of the survey, providing first-hand information about open source web and geospatial tools.

]]> 10.1504/IJWET.2011.043440 International Journal of Web Engineering and Technology, Vol. 6, No. 4 (2011) pp. 354 - 374 Andrea Ballatore; Ali Tahir; Gavin McArdle; Michela Bertolotto School of Computer Science and Informatics, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland. ' School of Computer Science and Informatics, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland. ' National Centre for Geocomputation, National University of Ireland Maynooth, Maynooth, Co. Kildare, Ireland. ' School of Computer Science and Informatics, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland open source free and open source software FOSS geographical information systems GIS web technology web architecture geospatial web services web mapping online survey spatial DBMS GIServices web graphical user interfaces web GUIs. 2011-10-29T23:20:50-05:00 6 4 354 374 2011-10-29T23:20:50-05:00 http://www.inderscience.com/link.php?id=43439 An increasing part of research in the Semantic Web has been directed at making data become the main concept of the web. Plenty of languages and specifications support this transition and work by inserting additional (semantic) markup into web documents. Yet, little attention is being paid to the possibility of expressing the actual structures of the documents in a form suitable for the semantic web. EARMARK is a model for explicitly expressing structural assertions of markup and documents, allowing a straightforward integration of the semantics of the markup and the semantics of the content. The well-formedness of a hierarchy, for instance, becomes an explicit assertion and similarly the analysis of the validity of markup structures become matter for further semantic analysis. This paper describes EARMARK and shows a framework for using OWL ontologies, that implement particular markup properties, to demonstrate the compliance of EARMARK documents with those properties. Using semantic web technologies for analysis and validation of structural markup
Angelo Di Iorio; Silvio Peroni; Fabio Vitali
International Journal of Web Engineering and Technology, Vol. 6, No. 4 (2011) pp. 375 - 398
An increasing part of research in the Semantic Web has been directed at making data become the main concept of the web. Plenty of languages and specifications support this transition and work by inserting additional (semantic) markup into web documents. Yet, little attention is being paid to the possibility of expressing the actual structures of the documents in a form suitable for the semantic web. EARMARK is a model for explicitly expressing structural assertions of markup and documents, allowing a straightforward integration of the semantics of the markup and the semantics of the content. The well-formedness of a hierarchy, for instance, becomes an explicit assertion and similarly the analysis of the validity of markup structures become matter for further semantic analysis. This paper describes EARMARK and shows a framework for using OWL ontologies, that implement particular markup properties, to demonstrate the compliance of EARMARK documents with those properties.

]]> 10.1504/IJWET.2011.043439 International Journal of Web Engineering and Technology, Vol. 6, No. 4 (2011) pp. 375 - 398 Angelo Di Iorio; Silvio Peroni; Fabio Vitali Department of Computer Science, University of Bologna, Mura Anteo Zamboni, 7, 40127 Bologna, Italy. ' Department of Computer Science, University of Bologna, Mura Anteo Zamboni, 7, 40127 Bologna, Italy. ' Department of Computer Science, University of Bologna, Mura Anteo Zamboni, 7, 40127 Bologna, Italy document structure extremely annotational RDF markup EARMARK OWL overlapping structural markup ontology structural patterns validation semantic web web documents. 2011-10-29T23:20:50-05:00 6 4 375 398 2011-10-29T23:20:50-05:00