Branimir Dukić

An Approach to Creating Domain Ontologies for Higher Education in Economics

Owing to development of ICT, knowledge representation and possibilities of its usage, sharing, storing and reusing, increasingly rely on ontologies as formal representation of (knowledge) conceptualization in different domain. Economics being the widest area of human personal and organizational activity as well as countless (structured and unstructured) data has no unified upper ontology and taxonomy. Economic curricula on faculties of economic in the Republic of Croatia reflect the problem of taxonomic shortcomings in economics as academic discipline. Numerous courses in economic curricula show the trends to specialization of economic knowledge but that also point out on decreasing capabilities of complex problem solving. The main idea in this paper is to research and define appropriate approach to ontology development useful for: -representing the institutional economic curricula which can serve to potential students in making the choice of their desirable courses, -representing academic discipline, -documenting the data, -creating meta data about learning and management systems. The approch will will be based on multiphase process of ontology creation and multilevel approach to common vocabulary creation and it will be tested on faculties of economics at universities in Croatia.

Conceptual model of public opinion monitoring system using mobile phones (m-Referendum)

Short message service communication, i.e., the number of short text messages is continually growing. The reason for that lies in the fact that more and more people have access to modern digital communication technology that is becoming more user-friendly and budget-priced. There are various uses of modern mobile communication technology and available infrastructure in solving practical problems. By means of telecommunication technology we can receive required information and distribute it from our telecommunication devices. In view of all the possibilities of telecommunication technology, it should also be used for the purpose of raising the degree of democracy and promoting civil society principles. Due to its simplicity and popularity, text messaging is almost an ideal means for public opinion surveys. It is especially interesting to consider the possibility and devise a model that would facilitate quick referendums and help acquire information on public opinion on particular political initiatives. This seemingly simple problem entails many technological, organizational and security issues which are to a certain degree solved by the proposed model.

Conceptual model for promotion of Croatian tourist product based on integration of CRM and Web technologies

Global economic crisis should be accepted in two ways: as a limitation, but also as an opportunity. Related to tourism, crisis will surely reflect on the Croatian tourism for a simple reason that the target group of Croatian tourism is middle and lower class population of the central and Western Europe, with lower purchasing power. These classes are the first to be hit by a crisis, which implies the necessity of reorganization of Croatian tourism toward those consumers who travel also at the times of crises. In order to do so, it is necessary to utilize potentials of information and communication technology, especially the Internet, and potentials of the customer relationship management concept. On the side of information and communication technology, particular advantages are provided by the concepts Web 2.0 as a synonym for social network, and Web 3.0 as a synonym for implementation of artificial intelligence in Web technologies. Synergistic effect of the above mentioned concepts and technology should be realized in the model of integral presentation of the Croatian tourist product through the Web.

Mobile Visitor Information System on Available Accommodation Capacity

Market transparency is one of the key success factors in the hospitality industry. Foreign visitors rely less and less on the services of tourist agencies, whereas travelling in organized groups to predetermined destinations is not as popular as it used to he. Modern tourists, especially younger population, increasingly choose their holiday destinations at the last moment, travelling on their own, frequently like nomads who change the resort several times during their holiday, and thus also their accommodation. In such conditions, especially in high season during summer, when accommodation occupancy rates are very high, efforts should he made to help the visitors find adequate lodging. Given the ubiquity of mobile phones which allow digital exchange of data, they can be easily used in conjunction with other information and communication technology to solve the problem of transparency for accommodation capacities. To do this, a simple system of digital exchange of data between visitors i.e. mobile phone users and the system for recording a\>ailable accommodation could be developed and put to use.

Analytical CRM model aimed at retail inventory optimization

Customer relationship management is a modern business philosophy that grew out of relationship marketing focusing on a consumer as an individual, i.e. on satisfying consumer needs in order to foster their loyalty and turn them into repeat customers. Although the primary goal of customer relationship management is to ensure the stability of revenue generation from a long-term partnership between a supplier and a consumer, it is also a philosophy that rationalizes operations primarily through reducing the costs of attracting new customers, thereby optimizing inventories. Inventory optimization involves adjusting the production process to the needs of consumers. In the modern retail environment, characterised by high level of competition, maintaining inventories not readily marketable can mean the difference between survival and going out of business. Therefore, modern retail systems tend to optimize inventory. Today, this would be impossible to do without the possibilities provided by CRM systems, in particular its subsystem, analytical CRM. Monitoring consumer behaviour in retail is within the scope of CRM system. Data obtained from such systems serve as the basis for inventory management. However, for inventory management to be possible, one has to consider which models, especially stochastic, can be used in inventory optimization. These models then need to be applied in the analytical subsystem of the CRM system. For such models to have use value, it is necessary to adjust the transaction part of the CRM system in terms of collecting the data needed for selected retail inventory optimization models. The answers to these and other questions relating to the use of analytical CRM in optimizing retail inventory are contained in the results of this research.

Potentials of the Internet in the function of financing humanitarian (non-profit) organizations project in transition countries

One of the crucial features of transition countries is the insufficiency of funds necessary to start and operate different nonprofit oriented projects. In order to realize their projects, nonprofit organizations in transition countries have to rely mostly on foreign sources, i.e. on donors from the developed countries. The Internet as one of the visually strongest means of global communication is an obvious and reasonable way to achieve transparency of nonprofit projects. A Web portal, which would present projects to potential donors in an interesting and visually attractive way, needs to be developed systematically. Given that the Web is a global information space, when creating project presentation systems, it is necessary to approach data modeling on the basis of the defined information requirements in the function of finding donors