Galal H. Galal-Edeen

The role of culture in e‐commerce use for the Egyptian consumers

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to systematically research and characterise the cultural response of a particular culture in the use of e‐commerce systems. The research paper highlights the roles of trust, uncertainty avoidance (UA), internet store familiarity, and reputation as the main salient factors affecting the perception of the targeted group toward e‐commerce.Design/methodology/approach – The paper employs a laboratory experiential survey with 370 Egyptian internet users during an internet shopping experience. The results are analysed using a number of statistical techniques including structural equation modelling.Findings – The research highlights the significant role of the internet stores perceived familiarity and reputation as the main antecedents of online trust. The relationship between trust and its two antecedents are found to be culturally sensitive; the high UA of the consumer is found to be associated with a stronger effect of the stores reputation on trust, and a stronger effe...

Towards a data warehouse testing framework

Data warehouse (DW) testing is a very critical stage in the DW development because decisions are made based on the information resulting from the DW. So, testing the quality of the resulting information will support the trustworthiness of the DW system. A number of approaches were made to describe how the testing process should take place in the DW environment. In this paper we will present briefly these testing approaches, and then a proposed matrix that structures the DW testing routines will be used to evaluate and compare these approaches. Afterwards an analysis of the comparison matrix will highlight the weakness points that exist in the available DW testing approaches. Finally, we will point out the requirements towards achieving a homogeneous DW testing framework. In the end, we will conclude our work.

Building Integrated Oil and Gas B2B E-commerce Hub Architecture Based on SOA

One of the most important reasons behind the failure of the previous generations of Business to Business (B2B) e-Commerce hubs was their solutions architectures. These B2B solutions architectures did not match the requirements of a business environment that needs flexible and innovative approaches to interact with market changes, business procedures, competition and day-to-day business practices. The paper uses the EDI Reference model, which is provided by the ISO organization to analyze the challenges of the architectures of B2B e-Commerce hubs. These challenges are summarized in: (A) a document-centric focus rather than business-process focus; (B) the complexity of creating new business models, or business services at runtime; (C) the interoperability limitations, and the data transformation challenges. The research presents a proposed architecture to build solutions architectures for B2B e-Commerce hubs. The proposed solution creates a clear, automatic path between the business specification layer and the technical implementation layer by combining both a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and management views in a single framework. The paper assesses the capabilities of the proposed architecture in building vertical B2B e-Marketplaces by applying the proposed architecture to the building of a vertical B2B e-Marketplace for the Oil and Gas sector. Further decomposition of the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) with semantic match making (reasoning techniques) has not been covered completely in the scope of this research, and future research can be extended to enhance this architecture.

Agility versus discipline: Is reconciliation possible?

Software development methodologies have been considered as essential to the production of high quality software, especially on time and within budget. During the last decade, a new school of practice that labels itself as the agile development school has emerged with a set of concepts that can be seen as diametrically opposed to the tenets of traditional methodologies. Promising effectiveness and efficiency in software development, agile practices are transforming methodologies for developing information systems. This paper discusses whether the two schools are in total contradiction and whether they can be in some way combined within the same project, showing the relation between the agile software development methodologies and the information systems development field.

Context-Based Variant Generation of Business Process Models

Nowadays, variability management of process models is a major challenge for Process-Aware Information Systems. Process model variants can be attributed to any of the following reasons: new technologies, governmental rules, organizational context or adoption of new standards. Current approaches to manage variants of process models address issues such as reducing the huge effort of modeling from scratch, preventing redundancy, and controlling inconsistency in process models. Although the effort to manage process model variants has been exerted, there are still limitations. Furthermore, existing approaches do not focus on variants that come from organizational or informational perspectives of process models. This paper introduces an approach to generate context-sensitive process model variants that come from adaptations in the organizational perspective. The approach is inspired by real life scenarios and has its conceptualization based on general concepts such as abstraction, and polymorphism.

Data warehouse testing

During the development of the data warehouse (DW), too much data is transformed, integrated, structured, cleansed, and grouped in a single structure that is the DW. These various types of changes could lead to data corruption or data manipulation. Therefore, DW testing is a very critical stage in the DW development process. A number of attempts were made to describe how the testing process should take place in the DW environment. In this paper, I will state briefly these testing approaches, and then a proposed matrix will be used to evaluate and compare these approaches. Afterwards, I will highlight the weakness points that exist in the available DW testing approaches. Finally, I will describe how I will fill the gap in the DW testing in my PhD by developing a DW Testing Framework presenting briefly its architecture. Then, I will state the scope of work that I am planning to address and what type of limitations that exist in this area that I am expecting to experience. In the end, I will conclude my work and state possible future work in the field of DW testing.

Building an integrated B2B e‐commerce hub architecture based on SOA and semantic ontology

Purpose – The previous generations of implemented B2B e‐commerce hub solutions (e‐Marketplaces) did not successfully fulfil the requirements of buyers and suppliers (“Participants”) in different business domains to carry out their daily business and online commercial transactions with one another because of their inappropriateness, and lack of flexibility. The limitations of these provided solutions came from a lot of architectural and technological challenges in the provided technical architectures that were used to build these solutions. This research aims to provide a proposed architecture to build integrated B2B e‐Commerce hub solutions. It also aims to make use of bottom‐up/top‐down approaches to building an integrated solution and to resolve the reasons for the failure of previous generations of B2B e‐commerce hubs.Design/methodology/approach – The research uses the EDI reference model, which is provided by the ISO organization to survey and analyze the challenges of previous generations of B2B e‐Co...

Towards RAM-Based Variant Generation of Business Process Models

Variability management of process models is a major challenge for Process-Aware Information Systems. Process model variants can be attributed to any of the following reasons: new technologies, governmental rules, organizational context or adoption of new standards. Current approaches to manage variants of process models address issues such as reducing the huge effort of modeling from scratch, preventing redundancy, and controlling inconsistency in process models. Although the effort to manage process model variants has been exerted, there are still limitations. Furthermore, existing approaches do not focus on variants that come from change in organizational perspective of process models. Organizational-driven variant management is an important area that still needs more study that we focus on in this paper. Resource Assignment Matrix (RAM) is an important aspect of the organizational perspective that has different variations. This paper introduces an approach inspired by real life scenario to generate consistent process model variants that come from adaptations in the RAM.

Satellite image encryption using neural networks backpropagation

The main goal of this paper is to investigate the applicability of a back-propagation artificial neural network on the encryption of huge-sized satellite images. The central contribution is using fixed, arbitrary keys in the training process as in classical symmetric and asymmetric cryptography. The used network is of NxMxN neurons representing the input, hidden, and output layers, respectively. The network is trained by adjusting the weights while the bias is given a constant value between 0 and 1 after normalizing the values. A bias is determined. The bias between the input layer and the hidden layer works as the first key (K1), while the bias between the hidden layer and the output layer represents a second key (K2). The training method uses K1, K2, or both and is done using images of small sizes to improve speed. Then, the network is used to encrypt and decrypt normal satellite images. Numerous trials were done for different satellite optical and SAR images and the goodness of fit (quality of decryption) between the original images and the decrypted ones was at least 98%, even for the images that the network was not previously trained to decrypt. It was also found that the network is not affected by geometrical image distortions like translation, size, and rotation.

Errors and discrepancies in the administration of intravenous infusions: a mixed methods multihospital observational study

Introduction Intravenous medication administration has traditionally been regarded as error prone, with high potential for harm. A recent US multisite study revealed few potentially harmful errors despite a high overall error rate. However, there is limited evidence about infusion practices in England and how they relate to prevalence and types of error. Objectives To determine the prevalence, types and severity of errors and discrepancies in infusion administration in English hospitals, and to explore sources of variation, including the contribution of smart pumps. Methods We conducted an observational point prevalence study of intravenous infusions in 16 National Health Service hospital trusts. Observers compared each infusion against the medication order and local policy. Deviations were classified as errors or discrepancies based on their potential for patient harm. Contextual issues and reasons for deviations were explored qualitatively during observer debriefs. Results Data were collected from 1326 patients and 2008 infusions. Errors were observed in 231 infusions (11.5%, 95% CI 10.2% to 13.0%). Discrepancies were observed in 1065 infusions (53.0%, 95% CI 50.8% to 55.2%). Twenty-three errors (1.1% of all infusions) were considered potentially harmful; none were judged likely to prolong hospital stay or result in long-term harm. Types and prevalence of errors and discrepancies varied widely among trusts, as did local policies. Deviations from medication orders and local policies were sometimes made for efficiency or patient need. Smart pumps, as currently implemented, had little effect, with similar error rates observed in infusions delivered with and without a smart pump (10.3% vs 10.8%, p=0.8). Conclusion Errors and discrepancies are relatively common in everyday infusion administrations but most have low potential for patient harm. Better understanding of performance variability to strategically manage risk may be a more helpful tactic than striving to eliminate all deviations.