Gerald Quirchmayr

E-Commerce and Web Technologies

Existing electronic negotiation systems (ENSs) typically implement a single, fixed negotiation protocol, which restricts their use to negotiation problems that were anticipated and established a priori by the system designers. The single-protocol restriction limits ENSs’ applicability in experiments and in many real-life negotiation situations. ENSs that allow for the use of different protocols also allow for the customization to users’ needs and abilities. We present theoretical foundations for the design of flexible and highly customizable protocol-driven ENSs. Our design enables researchers and negotiators to map negotiation activities onto system components and to construct their own negotiation protocols by creating a sequence of layout programs invoking components and rules. * This work was supported with grants from the Initiative for New Economy of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Canada, and the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council Canada. e-negotiations 2004 2

Multidisciplinary Research and Practice for Information Systems

Researchers often have to understand new knowledge areas, and identify research gaps and immature areas in them. They have to understand and link numerous publications to achieve this goal. This is difficult, because natural language has to be analyzed in the publications, and implicit relations between them have to be discovered. We propose to utilize the structuring possibilities of ontologies to make the relations between publications, knowledge objects (e.g., methods, tools, notations), and knowledge areas explicit. Furthermore, we use Kitchenham’s work on structured literature reviews and apply it to the ontology. We formalize relations between objects in the ontology using Codd’s relational algebra to support different kinds of literature research. These formal expressions are implemented as ontology queries. Thus, we implement an immature research area analysis and research gap identification mechanism. The ontology and its relations are implemented based on the Semantic MediaWiki+ platform.

Electronic Voting: Constitutional and Legal Requirements, and Their Technical Implications

This paper provides a systematic overview of the major constitutional and legalaspects of e-voting, together with their technical implications. All democracy-oriented legal and constitutional requirements of an Internet-based voting system are identified. Such a voting system has to comply with these, in order to encourage and promote the participation of citizens, without violating any of their fundamental rights (privacy, anonymity, equality, etc.).

A framework for outsourcing IS/IT security services

Purpose – This paper seeks to provide an overview of the major technical, organizational and legal issues pertaining to the outsourcing of IS/IT security services.Design/methodology/approach – The paper uses a combined socio‐technical approach to explore the different aspects of IS/IT security outsourcing and suggests a framework for accommodating security and privacy requirements that arise in outsourcing arrangements.Findings – Data protection requirements are a decisive factor for IS/IT security outsourcing, not only because they pose restrictions to management, but also because security and privacy concerns are commonly cited among the most important concerns prohibiting organizations from IS/IT outsourcing. New emerging trends such as outsourcing in third countries, pose significant new issues, with regard to meeting data protection requirements.Originality/value – The paper illustrates the reasons for which the outsourcing of IS/IT security needs to be examined under a different perspective from tra...

Multidimensional Business Process Analysis with the Process Warehouse

A data warehouse is a global information repository, which stores facts originating from multiple, heterogeneous data sources in materialised views. Up to now, a data warehouse has always been used for application data and never for control data. As efficiency, accuracy, transparency and flexibility of enterprise’s business processes have become fundamental for process reengineering programmes, paying attention to monitoring and controlling of workflow execution at an formal and strategic level will become a focus of information management in the near future.

Availability, Reliability and Security for Business, Enterprise and Health Information Systems

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the IFIP WG 8.4/8.9 International Cross Domain Conference and Workshop on Availability, Reliability and Security - Multidisciplinary Research and Practice for Business, Enterprise and Health Information Systems, ARGES 2011, held in Vienna, Austria, in August 2011. The 29 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the volume. The papers concentrate on the many aspects of availability, reliability and security for information systems as a discipline bridging the application fields and the well-defined computer science field. They are organized in three sections: multidisciplinary research and practice for business, enterprise and health information systems; massive information sharing and integration and electronic healthcare; and papers from the colocated International Workshop on Security and Cognitive Informatics for Homeland Defense.

Establishment of Virtual Enterprise Contracts

In this paper we describe an approach to the modelling of virtual enterprise agreements. An important and ever-present issue in the set-up phase of such a virtual enterprise is the virtual enterprise contract. As one of the goals of virtual enterprises is to become operational quickly, the time consumed by the set-up phase must be reduced to a minimum. At the same time it has to be guaranteed that the outcome of this phase leads to a formally correct and executable agreement. Our approach aims at showing how to achieve a formal model of virtual enterprise contracts, which can later be executed and monitored in a particular automated contract management environment.

Through-Walls Communication for Medical Emergency Services

The authors present a model for bringing the coordination power of workflow management systems to outdoor wearable augmented reality (AR) systems. They portray how mobile equipment may be integrated with adaptive, context-aware work environments. A scenario of a medical emergency task is described to illustrate the functionality of this form of collaboration system. Appropriate information stickers are introduced to support data collection in medical emergency scenarios in a sophisticated form through a hands-free user interface for medical personnel. They propose the use of new user interface technology, including multimedia, AR information stickers, and the allocation of patient medical records to identified locations of the human body. A key feature is the access to relevant information for users in the mobile environment as well as for those in the advanced control room. An additional advantage is the automatic recording of on-site data, which helps to build the medical record of a patient without interfering with the work of the emergency team.

Natural language processing technologies for developing a language learning environment

So far, Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) comes in many different flavors. Our research work focuses on developing an integrated e-learning environment that allows improving language skills in specific contexts. Integrated e-learning environment means that it is a Web-based solution that performs language learning tasks using common working environments like, for instance, Web browsers or Email clients. It should be accessible on different platforms, even on mobile devices. Natural Language Processing (NLP) forms the technological basis for developing such a learning framework. The paper gives an overview of the state-of-the-art in this area. Therefore, on the one hand, it explains creation processes for NLP resources and gives an overview of corpora. On the other hand, it describes existing NLP standards. Based on our requirements, the paper gives special attention to the evaluation and comparison of toolkits that can suitably support the planned implementation. An outlook at the end points out necessary developments in e-learning to keep in mind.

A Privacy Enhancing Service Architecture for Ticket-based Mobile Applications

Network operators gradually open their interfaces to formerly hidden services. This fosters the development of a new class of mobile applications that take into account users location and presence information. However, this development also raises problems especially the lack of protection of privacy in location-based services. This paper proposes a service architecture that is aimed at overcoming some of the shortages of currently existing context-aware applications that make use of network providers services as well as existing mobile payment systems. We therefore introduce the combination of tickets together with a novel privacy enhancing mechanism that is based on the notion of pseudonyms. Compared to other privacy enhancing solutions our pseudonym mechanism can also be implemented on mobile devices that have some restrictions regarding resources like memory or processing power. Due to their flexibility tickets can be used for many different kinds of applications. One important aspect in this respect is the highly postulated pay-as-you-go model. We give an example of a transport ticket application and explain the message interaction patterns for the basic functionalities of the systems, regarding aspects like data and privacy protection. This example further shows how 3rd party application providers can build meaningful mobile applications that are accepted by users