: In this paper we present the notion of “active documents”. The basic idea is that in the future, users of documents in any networked system should not just be able to communicate with other users, but also with documents. To put it differently, we believe that communication in networks should be understood in a more general sense than it usually is. Although our notion will, at first glance, ...

The advancement of wireless communication and mobile telecommunication has made mobile commerce possible. In the retail business under the evolving market, the users would like to utilize the appropriate services based on their preference and situation continuously. The service providers need to grasp the current requirements of the majority of the users in the local service area in order to pr...

Demand and capacity imbalances in the US national airspace are resolved using traffic management initiatives designed, in current operations, with little collaboration with the airspace users. NASA and its partners have developed a new collaborative concept of operations that requires the users and airspace service provider to work together to choose initiatives that better satisfy the business...

The deployment of the Virtual Home Environment (VHE) concept in 3G mobile systems in the near future will place many demands on managing a user’s personalised service environment. Key to the VHE concept is the performance of such services, resulting in a need to manage Quality of Service (QoS) demands and allocation on behalf of users. This paper examines the issues involved in managing QoS dem...

Traditionally information retrieval (IR) research has focussed on a single user interaction modality, where a user searches to satisfy an information need. Recent advances in both web technologies, such as the sociable web of Web 2.0, and computer hardware, such as tabletop interface devices, have enabled multiple users to collaborate on many computer-related tasks. Due to these advances there ...

The present paper explores the challenges, issues and solutions to satisfy the security requirements of a Multi-Agent System (MAS) based on the JADE framework. By means of a prototype system used for Learning Management, an adequate security concept for MAS in general is presented. Hereby several security features are considered, ranging, among others, from the authentication of users over encr...

purpose – this paper aims to describe the role of public libraries in bridging the digital divide. the paper firstly reviews the existing literature body in this area and then suggests a number of practical solutions. digital divide is a concept which appears in the area of information and communication technology (ict) since 1990 and refers to the existing inequality in accessing to ict among ...

Nowadays web users have clearly expressed their wishes to receive and interact with personalized services directly. However, existing approaches, largely syntactic content-based, fail to provide robust, accurate and useful personalized services to its users. Towards such an issue, the semantic web provides technologies to annotate and match services’ descriptions with users’ features, interests...

Without detailed knowledge of a collection, most users find it difficult to formulate effective queries. In fact, as observed from Web search engines, users may spend large amounts of time reformulating their queries in order to satisfy their information need. A proven successful method to overcome this difficulty is to treat the query as an initial attempt to retrieve information and use it to...