This paper provides insights on the nature of electricity supply in the rural village Macha, Zambia. It reports on case study research. Use of Information and Communication Technologies and access to e-services are constrained by the availability of electricity. In Zambia`s rural areas, 3.5% of households have access to electricity supply. This paper shows such electricity supply can be erratic...

Many online service businesses are beginning to charge fees for services that they used to provide for free. It is unclear whether consumers are ready to embrace this practice. This study explores the critical issue of consumer attitudes toward fee-based online services. The results of the study indicate that consumers’ willingness to pay for online services is likely to be influenced by their ...

In recent years we have witnessed a significant growth of social-computing communities—online services in which users share information in various forms. As content contributions from participants are critical to the viability of these communities, it is important to understand what drives users to participate and share information with others in such settings. We extend previous literature on ...

In this paper, we introduce the notion of Online Presence, a concept related to user’s presence on online services. We identify interoperability issues in the field of exchange of the online presence data and propose a solution in building a common model for semantic representation of online presence data. We present the Online Presence Ontology (OPO) together with benefits such an ontology cou...

The adoption of high impact governmental e-services is not obvious. Especially small and medium sized companies hesitate to invest and adopt. Non-adoption endangers the realization of the 25% reduction objective within the EU’s Lisbon Agenda of the administrative burden of businesses by 2012. On the other hand governmental organisations gain from the use of these eservices. In several cases thi...

Many existing studies have investigated to discover a variety of co-occurrence patterns between entities (e.g. users, tags and resources) from a folksonomy system. The common purposes among them are (i) to understand collective behaviors between online users and (ii) to provide online services (e.g. tag recommendation and information searching) to users. However, most of the existing studies as...

With the rapid development of e-services on the Web, increasing number of e-catalogs are becoming accessible to users. A large number of e-catalogs provide information about similar type of products/services. To simplify users information searching effort, data integration systems have being developed to integrate e-catalogs providing similar type of information such that users can query those ...

When designing e-services it is important that they fit smoothly into the service consumers’ business processes. If the e-services do not fit there is a risk that they will not be used by the consumers; the investment and effort to use the e-services might be too high. In this paper, we describe an approach for analysing requirements on e-services from the service consumers’ perspective. The ap...

The lack of a good understanding of customer needs within eservice initiatives caused severe financial losses in the Norwegian energy sector, resulting in the failure of e-service initiatives offering packages of independent services. One of the causes was a poor elicitation and understanding of the e-services at hand. In this paper, we propose an ontologically founded approach (1) to describe ...