Web services technologies promise to create new business applications by composing existing services and to publish these applications as services for further composition. The business logic of applications is described by abstract processes consisting of tasks which specify the required functionality. Web services provision refers to assigning concrete Web services to perform the constituent t...

In this paper we analyze quantitatively a business model for the collaborative provision of an advanced mobile data service portfolio composed of three multimedia services: Video on Demand, Internet Protocol Television and User Generated Content. We provide a description of the provision system considering the relation occurring between tecnical aspects and business aspects for each agent provi...

The funding for this research was provided by the Rockefeller Foundation and the EVALUATION Project. The survey used in this study could not have been completed without the cooperation and assistance of the community of international donors, NGOs, local government officials, and the Philippines Department of Health. Their cooperation and generosity with their expertise are much appreciated. We ...

Primary care groups are expected to meet the primary health care needs of their local population. In the inner-city London borough of Lambeth there are high levels of sexual health needs. The North Lambeth Primary Care Commissioning Group identified the evaluation and further development of contraceptive services, particularly to those under the age of 25, as a priority. An evaluation of curren...

PROBLEM Healthcare organisations are expected both to monitor inequalities in access to health services and also to act to improve access and increase equity in service provision. DESIGN Locally developed action research projects with an explicit objective of reducing inequalities in access. SETTING Eight different health care services in the Yorkshire and Humber region, including community...

This paper aims to investigate the use of mobile agents for service provision in mobile computing environments. A quantitative model and experimental measurements are performed to compare Java RMI and mobile agents in the special context of software downloading. The results show that significant performance improvements can be obtained using mobile agents. In addition, two agent-based services,...

The contemporary history of drug abuse treatment service provision in the United Kingdom (UK) can be traced to the late 1960s when the first drug clinics were opened following the introduction of the Dangerous Drugs Act. Treatment services were established then to tackle the emerging problem of opiate dependence and associated morbidity and mortality. Since then, service provision has come a lo...

Belief in the resource-saving and service-enhancing potential of inter-organizational collaboration has become virtually an article of faith among resource providers, client advocates, and service planners. Yet collaboration in practice encounters myriad difficulties, and successful collaborations seem to be relatively rare. In this paper, we focus on providers’ incentives to collaborate: why m...