The paper presents a distributed, service-oriented and open ICT infrastructure (ICT-I) being developed in a European research project which aims at helping members of Collaborative Networks in doing businesses together. ICT-I services are used on-demand, based on the ASP and pay-per-use models. The proposed ICT-I are so far being implemented to support members of virtual breeding environments, ...

Background: Defense organizations need to implement the services innovation practices in todaychr('39')s dynamic and changing environment. Defense organizations also need strategic human resource managements and employees chr('39') professional ethics to proceed and move towards service innovation. Accordingly, the present study has been conducted to investigate the relationship between strateg...

Pollination services underpin sustainability of restored ecosystems. Yet, outside of agri-environments, effective restoration of pollinator services in ecological restoration has received little attention. This deficiency in the knowledge needed to restore pollinator capability represents a major liability in restoration programs, particularly in regions where specialist invertebrate and verteb...

A bs tract The purpose o f this study was to develop a profile o f professional nursing practice in private enterprise health care services in the Republic o f South Africa. In the light o f the fu ture health care needs and the relationship between the private and public sector health care establishments, information about the role and task o f the I professional nurse was needed. * Informatio...

While the cost and flexibility benefits resulting from distributed and cloud computing environments are clearly evident, this approach also has farreaching implications for the threat surface presented as well as general information security risks, particularly to availability. The design of cloud-based storage services also implies that data once stored with such services may very hard to reca...

Many developed countries face a growing need for long-term care provision because of population ageing. Japan is one such example, given its population's longevity and low birth rate. In this study, we examine the efficiency of Japan's regional long-term care system in FY2010 by performing a data envelopment analysis, a non-parametric frontier approach, on prefectural data and separating cost e...

Web services are considered to be a major challenge for the information technology industry as they emerge from integration of several technologies adaptable within different architectures and platforms. Web Services are deployed within heterogeneous distributed environments; specifically B-2-B interactions are considered to be critical-mission activities for all parties involved, the main goal...

This paper draws attention to the increasing need for agile and adaptive software environments that are capable of supporting rapid re-planning during the execution of time-critical operations involving commercial end-to-end supply chain transaction sequences, as well as disaster response and military missions. It is argued that such environments are currently best served by information-centric...