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Professionally, people often conduct their work in settings containing a range of different collaborative situations and work practices in which people handle information and work activities. Still, work tasks are usually considered and perceived as individual activities although the technology and the characteristics of the tasks require collaborative and cooperative handling processes. This viewpoint still produces technologies that, in general, assume individual information management and decision-making. Based on previous research on information culture (IC) and collaborative information seeking (CIS), this paper proposes an integrated framework where both environmental (cultural) as well as collaborative aspects of organisational information behaviour are present. This kind of framework would be useful in studies looking into how information is retrieved, how information is organised and managed, and how information is used as a resource in collaborative settings. It gives a more holistic perspective to information use and practices in organisations where culture, collaboration and awareness are especially brought to common attention for effective information management in organisations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a personal view of the development of the role(s) of information professionals in the 50 years since ITS was founded. One of the justifications for the formation of ITS was that the then current professional bodies were not relevant to the needs of those employed in industrial information services. This paper reviews briefly the situation when ITS was formed, from the viewpoint of professional requirements and the developments since. The conclusion is drawn that today's information world, very different from that of 50 years ago, faces similar problems of a lack of suitable qualifications and a confusion in the roles of different actors in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to provide a brief overview of those developments which have taken the theory and practice of image and video retrieval into the digital age. Drawing on a voluminous literature, the context in which visual information retrieval takes place is followed by a consideration of the conceptual and practical challenges posed by the representation and recovery of visual material on the basis of its semantic content. An historical account of research endeavours in content-based retrieval, directed towards the automation of these operations in digital image scenarios, provides the main thrust of the paper. Finally, a look forwards locates visual information retrieval research within the wider context of content-based multimedia retrieval. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The viability of KM partly rests on how researchers garner empirical support for their purported theories. One aspect of this would involve the evaluation of the evidence provided in KM research. This paper presents a comparative study of the evidence that is presented in scholarly and professional literature on KM. For this purpose, the paper introduces a typology of evidence to analyze the data obtained from the survey of the literature. The classification based on this typology reveals quantitative differences between the types of evidence put forth in the scholarly and practitioner literature. More interestingly, however, our analysis reveals differences in terms of the questions they ask, the perspective they adopt, and the methods they follow to convince others of the validity of their claims. We explain these differences in terms of the notions of 'blackboxing' and 'performance' borrowed from actor-network theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a model for measuring intellectual capital (IC) within small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in correlation with the key factors for the successful implementation of knowledge management (KM). Most of the existing IC measurement models are intended to cover general aspects. The kernel of these models could be customized/extended to handle more specific aspects, like KM. The focus of this study is the integration between an IC measurement model and the key factors for successful implementing of KM. The paper identifies, analyses and compares IC elements that are relevant for SMEs and how they can be linked with the IC measurement methods for determining if a company is ready for KM. For this purpose, a general IC measurement model is taken as reference for the study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a comparative review of four seminal works on communities of practice. It is argued that the ambiguities of the terms community and practice are a source of the concept's reusability allowing it to be reappropriated for different purposes, academic and practical. However, it is potentially confusing that the works differ so markedly in their conceptualizations of community, learning, power and change, diversity and informality. The three earlier works are underpinned by a common epistemological view, but Lave and Wenger's 1991 short monograph is often read as primarily about the socialization of newcomers into knowledge by a form of apprenticeship, while the focus in Brown and Duguid's article of the same year is, in contrast, on improvising new knowledge in an interstitial group that forms in resistance to management. Wenger's 1998 book treats communities of practice as the informal relations and understandings that develop in mutual engagement on an appropriated joint enterprise, but his focus is the impact on individual identity. The applicability of the concept to the heavily individualized and tightly managed work of the twenty-first century is questionable. The most recent work by Wenger - this time with McDermott and Snyder as co-authors - marks a distinct shift towards a managerialist stance. The proposition that managers should foster informal horizontal groups across organizational boundaries is in fact a fundamental redefinition of the concept. However it does identify a plausible, if limited, knowledge management (KM) tool. This paper discusses different interpretations of the idea of ‘co-ordinating’ communities of practice as a management ideology of empowerment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To achieve the full potential of mobile commerce (m-Commerce), many problems need to be resolved, such as how to make m-Commerce seamlessly span wide areas with heterogeneous information sources; how to improve the matchmaking between user requirements and product specifications; and how to make m-Commerce systems more intelligent in taking different actions according to different user context environments. We believe that the semantic web is a promising technology to solve these problems. In this paper, a framework is proposed in which semantic web ontology is used to model the contexts, user profiles, and product/service information. The semantic web service ontology, OWL-S, is extended for matching user requirements with product specifications at the semantic level, with context information taken into account. Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) is used for inferencing with context and user profile descriptions. Our system adopts a multi-agent infrastructure to deal with the integration and interaction between information sources and users. This paper demonstrates some of the great potential of semantic web technology for m-Commerce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The knowledge-based economy is coming, and knowledge management (KM) has rapidly disseminated in academic circles as well as in the business world. While an increasing number of companies have launched into knowledge management initiatives, a large proportion of these initiatives are limited to a technical focus. The problem with this type of focus is that it excludes and neglects the true potential benefits that can be derived from knowledge management. This paper develops a new metric, knowledge management performance index (KMPI), for evaluating the performance of a firm in its KM at a point in time. We therefore suggest that a KMPI can be used to determine KM activities from the following perspectives: knowledge creation, knowledge conversion, knowledge circulation and knowledge completion. When KM activities efficiency is increased, KMPI will also be expanded, enabling firms to become knowledge intensive. This paper makes three important contributions: (1) it provides a formal theoretical grounding for the validity of the Black-Scholes model that might be applied to KM; (2) it proposes a measurement framework to enable knowledge assets to be leveraged effectively and efficiently; and (3) it presents the first application of the Black-Scholes model that uses a real-world business situation involving KM as its test bed. The results prove the option pricing model can act as a measurement guideline to the whole range of KM activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To be faced with a document collection and not to be able to find the information you know exists somewhere within it is a problem as old as the existence of document collections. Information architecture is the discipline dealing with the modern version of this problem: how to organize web sites so that users can actually find what they are looking for. Information architects have so far applied known and well-tried tools from library science to solve this problem, and now topic maps are sailing up as another potential tool for information architects. This raises the question of how topic maps compare with the traditional solutions, and that is the question this paper attempts to address. The paper argues that topic maps go beyond the traditional solutions in the sense that they provide a framework within which they can be represented as they are, but also extended in ways which significantly improve information retrieval. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile work challenges organizational records management. This paper reports the results of a study in three case organizations on how the organizations’ records management meets and adapts to the increasing role of mobile work. Data was collected by interviewing mobile workers and record management professionals. Documentary materials were used to analyse official records management policies. The findings revealed that documented organizational policies do not take into account mobile work, and cannot effectively support personal or corporate records management in mobile work. Records management professionals were poorly informed of the extent of mobile work in the organization, and of the special problems related to managing records in mobile work. The overall conclusion is that organizations should pay more attention to the new requirements for records management caused by mobile work. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Attempts to recognize ‘information’ as an asset have led to an increased awareness of why and how this invisible valuable resource does not appear in the financial statements. This paper aims to develop a model based on three-circled sets of criteria for the pre-measurement phase of an asset recognition process. This model should be applicable to all types of assets, but we mainly focus on information as an intangible-based asset. Semi-structured, in-depth interviews and a questionnaire survey were used to provide triangulating perspectives to follow the grounded theory approach and generate artefact-based asset recognition criteria. The generated theory is applied to information as a candidate asset to explain how this invisible resource can be recognized in financial statements. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Duplicate record detection has been an important issue in the fields of data and records management and various detection methods have been proposed. A new method, which uses an optical character recognition (OCR)-converted source of information for record matching to detect duplicates, is proposed and examined in this paper. First, the design of an experiment for examining the performance of such a duplicate detection method is discussed. The base record set with an OCR-converted title page and its verso were prepared along with two test record sets from different union catalogues, and duplicate records between the base record set and the test sets were manually identified. A duplicate detection system was developed to execute matching (1) between records, (2) between a record and an OCR-converted source of information and (3) using a combination of these. Second, matching performance at the individual data element level is examined. Third, the performance of duplicate record detection based on matching at the element level is examined through rule-based detection and machine learning-based detection. The results of the experiment show the usefulness of incorporating source of information into duplicate detection to a certain extent. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Palliative care seeks to improve quality of life for patients with terminal, chronic or life-long, illnesses. In the UK, most palliative care occurs in primary care, for example, through general practices. A recent national UK survey of palliative care within general practices concluded that practices that utilized recognized initiatives to promote palliative care demonstrated better clinical care and higher perceived quality of palliative care. This paper reports on secondary analyses from that survey to investigate the management of information related to palliative care within practices. Relatively high levels of information provision to families and carers were reported, over two-thirds of practices reported having unified records for palliative care patients and over 90% of practices reported having a cancer/palliative care register that was fully or mostly operational. Larger practices, those using the Gold Standards Framework and practices using unified record keeping for palliative care, were independently more likely to give information to families and carers and were more likely to have a mostly or fully operational palliative care register. When testing for the relationship between measures of the structures and processes of information management and the perceived quality of care, as an outcome, within the practices, practices with a fully operational palliative care register and practices that had higher scores on the record-keeping scale were more likely to rate the quality of their palliative care as very good. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Much attention has been given to the challenges of handling massive data volumes in modern data-intensive science. This paper examines an equally daunting challenge – the diversity of interdisciplinary data, notably research data, and the need to interrelate these data to understand complex systemic problems such as environmental change and its impact. We use the experience of the International Polar Year 2007–8 (IPY) as a case study to examine data management approaches seeking to address issues around complex interdisciplinary science. We find that, while technology is a critical factor in addressing the interdisciplinary dimension of the data intensive science, the technologies developing for exa-scale data volumes differ from those that are needed for extremely distributed and heterogeneous data. Research data will continue to be highly heterogeneous and distributed and will require technologies to be much simpler and more flexible. More importantly, there is a need for both technical and cultural adaptation. We describe a vision of discoverable, open, linked, useful, and safe collections of data, organized and curated using the best principles and practices of information and library science. This vision provides a framework for our discussion and leads us to suggest several short- and long-term strategies to facilitate a socio-technical evolution in the overall science data ecosystem. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The scope of this paper is to report on an interpretation of the significance and the meanings of the signage of intranet sites. Based on the theories of structuralist semiology, we examined 22 intranet sites of companies and public sector organizations, as well as six intranet construction systems. Analysis and interpretation of such sources indicates that web sites conceal a virtual segregation structure, under the guise of integration of information. The text contributes to an understanding of relationships between the fields of information technology and domination systems, with practical implications for the development of points of interaction between the fields of information science and management science. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Finding the correct category (class) a new unclassified document belongs to is an interesting and difficult problem, with a wide range of applications. Our methodology for narrative text classification is based on two techniques: we calculate the distance (similarity) between the new unclassified document and all the pre-classified documents of each class and also calculate the similarity of the new document to the ‘average class document’ of each class. In both cases we use key phrases (text phrases or key terms) as the distinctive features of our text classification methodology and eventually the proposed text classification method is based on the automatic extraction of an authority list of key phrases that is appropriate for discriminating between different classes. In this paper, we apply this methodology in handling Greek text and we present the key concepts, the algorithms, and some critical decisions. A number of parameters of the mining algorithm are also fine tuned. The actual text classification system, the adopted (embedded) ideas and the alternative values of parameters are evaluated using two training sets (test collections). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper evaluates the e-book usage and information seeking and reading behaviour of thousands of business and management students. Comparisons are made with students in other subjects. The data largely come from the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)-funded National e-Books Observatory (NeBO) project as well as the JISC User Behaviour Observational Study. The main sources of data were: a) transactional logs obtained from the MyiLibrary platform regarding 127 UK universities; b) questionnaire data for more than 5000 students and staff at these universities; c) hard-copy library circulation and retail sales data; and d) focus groups held with 50 staff and students from selected universities. The main findings were that e-textbooks can prove to be extremely popular and widely used, mainly for obtaining snippets of information and for fact finding. The main reason for using e-textbooks was ease of access and convenience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on findings of a comparative study conducted among small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the USA, Spain, Portugal and Poland regarding different aspects of the business digital divide. Specifically, this study explores a shift in the perception and ranking of barriers to implementation of information and communication technology (ICT)-based solutions among SMEs, which can be attributed to the degree of ICT readiness exhibited by a given country. We have verified a hypothesis that the more knowledge-based a given economy is (as measured by ICT indexes), the more likely it is that perception of the key ICT implementation barriers among SMEs will shift away from mere lack of funds and technology toward lack of knowledge, education and information system planning. The conclusion of this study may well serve a better distribution of resources allocated by the governments to overcome the business digital divide that limits productivity of so many SMEs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the capacity to provide the necessary infrastructure to implement knowledge management processes, electronic knowledge repositories (EKRs) have gradually evolved into a backbone for many organizations, and have become a topic of much concern in recent MIS studies. Among the diverse theories commonly employed to target the issue are social capital theory, social cognitive theory, and task technology fit (TTF). Social capital theory primarily addresses issues of what components constitute a social network and how they influence an individual's behavior, necessitating the introduction of social cognitive theory as the foundation for the interpretation of personal cognition. Task technology fit theory, which highlights the fit between the technological characteristics and the user's task character, is also a key factor in determining the EKR usage. This paper integrates these three theories to investigate and compare the main influences on EKR usage from personal, social and technological perspectives. Through a sampling survey of 194 EKR users, EKR self-efficacy, trust, and task technology fit are found to have substantial influences on the EKR usage. Among these three main factors, EKR self-efficacy plays the most important role in determining EKR usage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An increasing number of robots harvest information on the world wide web for a wide variety of purposes. Protocols developed at the inception of the web laid out voluntary procedures in order to identify robot behaviour, and exclude it if necessary. Few robots now follow this protocol and it is now increasingly difficult to filter for this activity in reports of on-site activity. This paper seeks to demonstrate the issues involved in identifying robots and assessing their impact on usage in regard to a project which sought to establish the relative usage patterns of open access and non-open access articles in the Oxford University Press published journal Glycobiology, which offers in a single issue articles in both forms. A number of methods for identifying robots are compared and together these methods found that 40% of the raw logs of this journal could be attributed to robots. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a personal take on the history of evaluation experiments in information retrieval. It describes some of the early experiments that were formative in our understanding, and goes on to discuss the current dominance of TREC (the Text REtrieval Conference) and to assess its impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright issues are significant for worldwide information sharing, while mutual understanding about the commonalities and differences among international copyright law articles is difficult due to the diversity of legal knowledge representation. The goal of our research is to propose an appropriate methodology and capture a uniform conceptual model that will provide semantic level representation for processing and modelling international legal knowledge using ontological technology. This paper proposes a preliminary intention-oriented legal knowledge model as a pivotal model that, from the viewpoint of intention behind the law, manages and models legal knowledge derived from international law documents. We develop a domain ontology -- international copyright law ontology, which is used as a fundamental conceptual framework to maintain consistency among diverse legal knowledge representations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last fifty years, French public authorities have played a major role in developing a policy for scientific and technical information (STI) in France. Four distinct periods can be identified. During the first, from 1955 to 1973, policy was dominated by de Gaulle's concern to combat American hegemony and, since that time, STI policy has always been considered a part of French global politics. The second period from 1973 to 1982 saw the construction of the national STI infrastructure which was followed by a focus on content and database coordination up to 1993. Since that date, France's policy has been marked by the deregulation of telecommunications and the privatization of public services. The question addressed in this paper concerns the current role of public authorities in preparing French society for active participation in the knowledge society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper revisits the data-information-knowledge-wisdom (DIKW) hierarchy by examining the articulation of the hierarchy in a number of widely read textbooks, and analysing their statements about the nature of data, information, knowledge, and wisdom. The hierarchy referred to variously as the 'Knowledge Hierarchy', the 'Information Hierarchy' and the 'Knowledge Pyramid' is one of the fundamental, widely recognized and 'taken-for-granted' models in the information and knowledge literatures. It is often quoted, or used implicitly, in definitions of data, information and knowledge in the information management, information systems and knowledge management literatures, but there has been limited direct discussion of the hierarchy. After revisiting Ackoff's original articulation of the hierarchy, definitions of data, information, knowledge and wisdom as articulated in recent textbooks in information systems and knowledge management are reviewed and assessed, in pursuit of a consensus on definitions and transformation processes. This process brings to the surface the extent of agreement and dissent in relation to these definitions, and provides a basis for a discussion as to whether these articulations present an adequate distinction between data, information, and knowledge. Typically information is defined in terms of data, knowledge in terms of information, and wisdom in terms of knowledge, but there is less consensus in the description of the processes that transform elements lower in the hierarchy into those above them, leading to a lack of definitional clarity. In addition, there is limited reference to wisdom in these texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Name Search is an important search function in various types of information retrieval systems, such as online library catalogs and electronic yellow pages. It is also difficult, because of the high degree of fuzziness required in matching name variants. Previous approaches to name search systems use ad hoc combinations of search heuristics. This paper first discusses two approaches to name modeling - the natural language processing (NLP) and information retrieval (IR) models - and proposes a hybrid approach. The approach demonstrates a critical combination of complementary NILP and IR features that produces more effective fuzzy name matching. Two principles, position-as-attribute and position-transition-likelihood, are introduced as the principles for integrating the advantageous aspects of both approaches. They have been implemented in an NLP- and JR-hybrid model system called Friendly Name Search (FNS) for real world applications in multilingual directory searches on the Singapore Yellow pages website. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Valuable knowledge in organizations is too often ‘locked in’ within one unit. The contribution of this paper is to provide insights into the knowledge-sharing effect of inter-unit coordination mechanisms. This topic has not yet received in-depth study. We fill this gap with a case study of a UK-based multinational, in which we explore knowledge sharing between business units. Data was collected using a questionnaire and interviews. The findings from our study highlight that formal coordination is preferable. Informal networking as an inter-unit coordination mechanism was not perceived as beneficial for knowledge sharing. The knowledge-sharing enablers, trust and knowledge complexity, largely dominated the possibilities for inter-unit knowledge sharing whatever coordination was used. Especially, the perceived knowledge complexity caused problems that could not be fully compensated for by any type of coordination mechanism. The study also highlights the unexpectedly minor role of common knowledge and the only indirect effect of coordination through values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the socio-cognitive framework of sense-making, this paper explicates the term ‘mental model’ and its associated concepts, analyzes the controversies and connections pertaining to mental model research in information studies, and reports the findings of an exploratory study of the mental models of an academic information system. As one aspect of the process of making sense out of their experiences, individuals develop mental models of the systems and processes with which they interact. These models include (1) key components, (2) relationships between those components, and (3) techniques for interacting with the system or process. The small-scale study discussed here identifies three distinct patterns across the models of information seeking held by graduate students in a reference course. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents a case study of a large Canadian law firm with a distinctive information culture that is vigorously implementing an information management strategy. Our findings suggest that, at least for this organization, information culture trumps information management in its impact on information use outcomes. Thus, the strongly held information values and behaviors in the firm accounted for more than one- third of the variance in information use outcomes. Employees did perceive a high level of information management activity in the firm, although information management played a smaller, perhaps indirect role in explaining information use outcomes. What might organizations do to improve information use? This study suggests that organizations might do well to recognize that, in the hustle and bustle to implement strategies and systems, information values and information culture will always have a defining influence on how people share and use information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trillions of dollars are annually spent on the development and implementation of information technology within the United States and around the world. On average, roughly 50% of such systems are considered failures or fall short of meeting the expectations set forth by management. The lost productivity and high costs associated with these shortcomings necessitate the identification of alternative frameworks for facilitating the successful acceptance and continued internalization of new technologies. Internalization is defined as the effective and continued use of a technology over time. As such, this paper introduces a conceptual model for examining the effect of trust and planned change initiatives on technology adoption behavior. We propose that technology trust and interpersonal trust, when coupled with planned change initiatives, lead to greater technology adoption and internalization. A series of propositions are introduced and examined between trust, planned change, technology adoption, and internalization. Implications and recommendations for future explorations and development are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital libraries, e-journal platforms, portals, e-prints and other web-based information systems provide services supporting users to perform intense work tasks that require complex interaction activities. The main components of such services are the users, the offered content and the system on which they are performed. This paper presents a model, which analyses the attributes of the electronic information services' components that affect user interaction and correlates them in the usefulness and usability evaluation process. An experimental study traces the relations between usefulness and usability, indicating that these evaluation parameters are interconnected and users do not find discriminating differences between them. The analysis of the content and system attributes suggests that user interaction is affected equally by content and system characteristics. Finally, the study illustrates users' preference for the attributes that constitute a useful system in contrast to those that support usability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the weakness of the canonical support-confidence framework for associations mining has been widely studied. One of the difficulties in applying association rules mining is the setting of support constraints. A high-support constraint avoids the combinatorial explosion in discovering frequent itemsets, but at the expense of missing interesting patterns of low support. Instead of seeking a way to set the appropriate support constraints, all current approaches leave the users in charge of the support setting, which, however, puts the users in a dilemma. This paper is an effort to answer this long-standing open question. According to the notion of confidence and lift measures, we propose an automatic support specification for efficiently mining high- confidence and positive-lift associations without consulting the users. Experimental results show that the proposed method is not only good at discovering high-confidence and positive-lift associations, but also effective in reducing spurious frequent itemsets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the development of knowledge management (KM) was surveyed, using a literature review and classification of articles from 1995 to 2004. With a keyword index and article abstract, we explored how KM performance evaluation has developed during this period. Based on a scope of 108 articles from 80 academic KM journals (retrieved from six online databases), we surveyed and classified methods of KM measurement, using the following eight categories: qualitative analysis, quantitative analysis, financial indicator analysis, non-financial indicator analysis, internal performance analysis, external performance analysis, project-orientated analysis and organization- orientated analysis, together with their measurement matrices for different research and problem domains. Future development directions for KM performance evaluation are presented in our discussion. They include: (1) KM performance measurements have tended towards expertise orientation, while evaluation development is a problem- orientated domain; (2) different information technology methodologies, such as expert systems, knowledge-based systems and case-based reasoning may be able to evaluate KM as simply another methodology; (3) the ability to continually change and obtain new understanding is the driving power behind KM methodologies, and should be the basis of KM performance evaluations in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors propose a convergent model for information literacy (IL) based on complementary proficiencies in research and web literacy. Within this integrated framework, information technology (IT) is an essential dynamic in IL instruction. This model was designed, implemented and tested in an upper-level discipline-specific undergraduate information science (IS) course that requires students to develop research-oriented web pages. This study finds that student familiarity with IL and IT increased in this course. In addition, students who indicated a familiarity with certain web design terms also reported a familiarity with certain IL terms. A factor analysis of survey data indicates that a correlation may exist between research and web design in the development of comprehensive IL knowledge. This paper identifies three dimensions of IL and IT: web environment knowledge, web development knowledge, and research skills. This model is portable to other courses, programs, and organizations engaged in IL and IT instruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For pattern recognition, the weight of the feature index is very important and is usually used to measure the feature index's importance. The weight is usually divided into two types. One is determined by the knowledge and experience of experts or individuals, and called subjective weight; the other is based on statistical properties and measurement data, and is called objective weight. In this paper, a new objective weight, information entropy weight (IEW) is defined and constructed based on information entropy and the practical background of the survey data. On the basis of gray relation analysis and IEW presented here, a new concept of information incidence degree (IID) is proposed. A new method of incidence pattern recognition based on IID is set up, and applied to soil nutrient data processing. The results of simulation application show that the method presented here is feasible and effective. It provides a new research approach for information pattern recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the usefulness of data mining in various fields of information science, various mining methods have been proposed in previous research. Recently, in these fields, data has taken the form of continuous data streams rather than finite stored data sets. In this paper, a mining method of sequential patterns over an online sequence data stream is proposed, which is useful for retrieving embedded knowledge in the data stream. The proposed method can minimize memory usage of the mining process while an error is allowed in its mining result, and supports flexible trade-off between memory usage and mining accuracy. However, the error is minimized by an accurate estimation method for the count of a sequence, which considers the ordering information of items. The proposed method can catch a recent change in a sequence data stream in a short time, by a decaying mechanism gracefully discarding old information that may be no longer useful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Metadata can be used to precisely represent data semantics. It can also serve to improve data sharing and exchange. Because the various types of metadata are created in different ways, they can suffer from a problem of inconsistency. Recently, metadata gateway methods have been researched to solve this problem. However, the performance of the existing approaches based on metadata schemas is poor and their maintenance (adaptation of metadata changes) is time consuming. In this paper, a novel message conversion system is proposed, which functions by separating the heterogeneous mapping information from the mapping rules of the metadata, in order to overcome the drawbacks of the existing metadata gateway methods. The proposed system controls the standardized data elements dynamically based on the Metadata Registry (MDR), which is one of the most important elements of the ISO/IEC 11179 standard. The problems associated with adding supplementary metadata are resolved, since the standard provides for incorporating additional data elements created in the future. MSDL is defined as a protocol which can be used for exchanging messages between heterogeneous systems, and which ensures that all of the systems have their own independent metadata schemas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars in many disciplines have considered the antecedents and consequences of various forms of trust. This paper generates 11 propositions exploring the relationship between Human Resource Information Systems (HRIS) and the trust an individual places in the inanimate technology (technology trust) and models the effect of those relationships on HRIS implementation success. Specifically, organizational, technological, and user factors are considered and modeled to generate a set of testable propositions that can subsequently be investigated in various organizational settings. Eleven propositions are offered suggesting that organizational trust, pooled interdependence, organizational community, organizational culture, technology adoption, technology utility, technology usability, socialization, sensitivity to privacy, and predisposition to trust influence an individual's level of trust in the HRIS technology (technology trust) and ultimately the success of an HRIS implementation process. A summary of the relationships between the key constructs in the model and recommendations for future research are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Effective knowledge management (KM) has been a topic of great interest and extensively studied by organization researchers. Yet there is little research that attempts to explain the organizational KM performance in terms of employees' satisfaction. To address this gap, this paper proposes a path model employing a number of constructs: innovativeness, interfunctional coordination, the KM processes of socialization, externalization, combination, and internalization, and employees' perceived KM satisfaction. Empirical testing of the model is based on a sample of 157 enterprises from the Taiwanese information service industry. The results show that 10 of the 16 hypothesized relationships are supported by empirical data. The implications of these findings for knowledge management are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks have been drawing significant attention in the area of information management and sharing recently. Unlike the World Wide Web (WWW), every peer in a P2P network is both client and server. It hosts information for sharing and submits queries to search for information from all of the other peers at the same time. There are a large number of studies related to the information behavior of WWW search engines in the US and Europe. Several issues have been investigated in these studies including number of unique and repeat queries, length of queries, terms being used in queries, successive searching, multitasking searching, multiple searching sessions, changes of topics, multimedia searching, etc. The number of similar studies in P2P networks is significantly less. We have previously studied the information behavior of Gnutella P2P network based on data collected in 2002. In this paper, we present changes in Gnutella queries, based on the previously collected data and new data collected in 2003. Similar metrics to those used by Spink, Wolfram, Jansen, and Saracevic and in our previous study are used. We found that the number of non-English queries has increased. The number of repeat queries in P2P has decreased but is still more than that for WWW search engines. The length of queries has been increased by about 40%. The topics of interest have shifted from entertainment and sexuality to computers and entertainment. In general, the information behavior of P2P users has been changing as the P2P technology becomes more mature and the P2P users become more familiar with the technology. As the P2P technology begins to be adopted in e-Business, we foresee that there will be more changes in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The complex nature of the matrix organizational structure presents a communication paradigm unparalled by any other management position, creating an organizational environment that is uniquely sensitive to interpersonal communications. This paper discusses the organizational enviromnent typically found in major information systems initiatives as well as some of the interpersonal communications challenges encountered by the IT project manager. Suggestions are provided as bridges to avoid the pitfalls these challenges present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Context information plays an important role in context-aware mobile commerce (m-commerce) applications. Context information must be preprocessed, integrated and modelled before being stored and then used in a context- aware m-commerce application. Based on Knowledge Management (KM) theories and practice, this paper proposes a framework that uses several information technologies to collect, process, integrate, model, store and use context information. This framework will help effectively manage this information, as well as provide integrated context information about location, weather, time and user activities to enable context-awareness of an m-commerce application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports findings from a small number of interviews (six) with internationally-active information professionals and academics using a semi-structured interview instrument. The value of information, its identification, use and impact are discussed. Seven themes were explored within the broad context of the role of information assets in enhancing organizational effectiveness. These themes were: value of information and its measurement; impact of the concepts of knowledge management and intellectual capital; acquisition and use of information and the embedding of good practice; relevance of these questions to other industry sectors; identification of attributes of information assets; information assets and organizational effectiveness; and the impact of identification and measurement of information assets on the perceptions of senior managers. The major conclusion was that studies in this field should take a very broad view of information assets and should not be restricted to valuation in financial terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews the work of the Chemoinfonnatics Research Group in the Department of Information Studies at the University of Sheffield, focusing particularly on the work carried out in the period 1985-2002. Four major research areas are discussed, these involving the development of methods for: substructure searching in databases of three-dimensional structures, including both rigid and flexible molecules; the representation and searching of the Markush structures that occur in chemical patents; similarity searching in databases of both two-dimensional and three-dimensional structures; and compound selection and the design of combinatorial libraries. An analysis of citations to 321 publications from the Group shows that it attracted a total of 3725 residual citations during the period 1980-2002. These citations appeared in 411 different journals, and involved 910 different citing organizations from 54 different countries, thus demonstrating the widespread impact of the Group's work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper traces the development of user-based research in the Department of Information Studies at the University of Sheffield over the past 40 years, and highlights and assesses the different research questions addressed and main characteristics of projects undertaken. Four phases of user-based studies relating to information seeking and retrieval are identified including: preliminary studies on library users; empirical studies on information user groups by the Centre for research on User Studies; the development of a theoretical framework for user studies; and the integration of information seeking and retrieval research. The review concludes that user-based studies have evolved linking together studies on information use and provision, information seeking behaviour and the design and evaluation of actual retrieval systems. The unifying element has been the emphasis placed on methodological issues. More recent work is transcending user-orientated and system perspectives giving way to a more integrated approach and emergent interaction paradigm for user studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, editor of "Journal of Information Science" has expressed his view on articles published in its July 2003 issue. Editor says that this principal issue has two types of activities. First, the studies of the computational tools required to support information systems of various sorts, which are carried out by the computational informatics research group. The first three papers discuss work in computational informatics. The next two papers published describe work carried out in library and information management. This issue also considers the impact of information systems solutions on creativity and innovations.

The article discusses the content of the articles within the issue. The first four articles in this issue focus on the psychology of information and information systems. One article analyzes the notion of information privacy. In the paper of Gail Rein, she explores the conceptualization and encoding of reputation. Another paper, combines psychology, linguistics and information architecture to explore how the precise wording used in menus and hyperlinks affects end user behavior on website. Finally, the author builds on this new media theme, recognizing that the information world is shifting towards streaming sources where information is fed continuously to many devices.