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Accurate specification and validation of information requirements is critical to the development of organizational information systems. Semantic data models were developed to provide a precise and unambiguous representation of organizational […]

The article focuses on information retrieval systems and its usefulness in business enterprises. Information systems (IS) are quickly emerging as critical resources to be leveraged for organizational productivity in many business, social, and economic enterprises. The explosive growth in information technology (IT) can be broadly attributed to the emerging novel linkages of IS/IT with several base disciplines, extending the reach of IS/IT to application domains. In this focus is on certain important and promising IS/IT frontiers identified from the perspectives of academia, industry, and federal research funding agencies. Author's objective is to focus the collective awareness of the IS community and those in related disciplines on some of the frontier developments in IS/IT with a vision of the road ahead and point to challenges and opportunities. The following emerging frontiers in IS/IT are addressed in the article: the integrated circuits revolution, object technologies, knowledge and distributed intelligence, the evolving multiagent intelligent systems, satellite networks and mobile computing and the virtual corporation of the next millennium.

This article focuses on two semantic data models, the extended entity relationship (EER) model, and the Nijssen information analysis methodology (NIAM ) model. This article presents an empirical study that compares two popular semantic data models, the EER and NIAM. The EER model is a more powerful version of the original entity-relationship (ER) model. It is among the most widely used data modeling formalisms. The NIAM model is based on an early binary modeling work. It is widely used in Australia and Europe and is considered, along with the ER approach, to be among the major approaches used internationally. The study analyzes the effects of these modeling formalisms on analyst tasks and user tasks. This research studies the effects of different data modeling formalisms on the modeling and validation phases. This study makes a clear distinction between how users and analysts utilize data modeling, maintaining that large-scale data models will continue to be developed by analysts interacting with users. This research involves both modeling and validation tasks.

Presents several letters to the editor about the software patents published in October, 1995, issue of the journal "Communications of the ACM.". Focuses on the development of the customer-centered software; Comments on the lack of access to recent literature on object-role model; Focuses on the advantages of object-role model in modeling and validation; Studies the comparison of data modeling with an object-role model.

Prior research on intelligent Internet agents has failed to address the needs of long-lived data-collecting agents, focusing instead on short-lived transaction agents. Transaction agents typically run for a few seconds and retrieve information for a single transaction. With the staggering growth of electronic commerce, researchers and practitioners will want to design long-lived data-collecting agents that intelligently search for, retrieve, interpret, categorize, and store vast amounts of related information each time that they run. Such agents can run over the course of days rather than seconds and can be used by practitioners for decision support applications or by researchers as part of an empirical research methodology. This paper proposes a framework for agent sophistication, and emphasizes a number of design concepts for long-lived Internet agents, including intelligence, validation, concurrency, recovery, monitoring, and interactivity. These concepts are used in the development of an illustrative tool called Electronic Data Retrieval LexicaL Agent (eDRILL), an object-oriented data-collecting agent. eDRILL is designed using the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and is written in Java. It gathers research data from an online auction. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Object technology has been widely acclaimed as offering a revolution in computing that will resolve a myriad of problems inherent in developing and managing organizational information processing capabilities. Although its foundations arose in computer programming languages, object technology has implications for a wide range of business computing activities including: Programming, Analysis and Design, Information Management, and Information Sharing. We examine six fundamental research frontiers in each activity: Common Business Classes; Organizational Barriers; Applications and Tools; Reuse and Object Management; Standards, Testing, and Metrics; and Technology Investment. The cross product of the business computing activities with these fundamental research frontiers yields a taxonomy within which to position the research needed to realize the promises offered by object technology.