This article examines in detail the European Commission’s main instrument in aiding the fluency of merger procedures, the Best Practices on the conduct of EC merger proceedings guideline, and portrays its positive effect on the regulatory transition phase of 2004, when the new EC Merger regulation 139/2004 came into force. Relevant background information concerning the legal context is provided...

Organizations are evolving at an ever-increasing rate due to economic changes, globalization, and technology enabled changes such as e-business. These changes require existing and new software systems to be flexible enough to support rapid change while still being reliable and cost effective. Software flexibility has previously been studied only from a structural perspective with little attenti...

This paper presents the Collaborative Task Manager (CTM), which offers a unified management of shared tasks and commitments involving the usage of heterogeneous applications. The CTM supports the synchronization of user activities, and the management of workspace awareness, in customized collaboration environments. In particular, the CTM enables the user to resume the activity context of a task...

The paper describes MEDIS (Medical Device Information System), a system developed to support the whole lifecycle of a Clinical Investigation (CI) for Medical Devices, providing details on the approach used in its development. MEDIS is a software system that collects and manages data and documents, exchanged between an applicant and the Italian National Competent Authority during all the phases ...

When compared to local applications, aspects such as data transfer, transaction handling, and change notification add an additional level of complexity when developing collaborative distributed applications. Middleware layers strive to reduce this complexity, but without the right application programming interface, most of the complexity is only relocated instead of being removed. ATTRIBUTES &C...

Near-real-time monitoring of active landslides or landslide-prone hillslopes can provide immediate notification of landslide activity, as well as high-quality data sets for understanding the initiation and movement of landslides. Typical components of ground-based, near-real-time landslide monitoring systems include field sensors, data acquisition systems, remote telemetry, and software for bas...