Preface Section 1: Technologies and Service-oriented Solutions (consists of Ten Chapters)

This book, Research and Development in E-Business through Service-Oriented Solutions was rather designed to be a diverse representation of current e-business technologies focusing on various services and solutions, than a standard textbook. The authors and the reviewers of the chapters are field experts with theoretical and practical knowledge on the subjects covered, and they are representing a wide variety of universities and institutions for informatics and communication based on Internet solutions. This book is composed of two sections. The first section, titled “Technologies and Service-Oriented Solutions,” presents a general overview of e-business by discussing modeling languages, protocols, business intelligence and semantics, as well as business process modeling, security issues, cloud computing related applications, and mobile commerce. The ten chapters in the first section also familiarize the reader with some important trends in e-business, and focus on special research directions and solutions for e-business technologies. The second section, titled “Selected Case Studies,” features six chapters representing various challenges and current application models of e-business in a broad range of activities: the authors present case studies from the hospitality industry in Kenya, discuss investment and outsourcing in Taiwanese hospitals, familiarize the reader with a unique application of e-health by virtual worlds, focus on the retailing of prepared food in Australia, and discuss biometrics technology implementation, Internet banking, and e-filing in Malaysia.