Keith Toh

A Collaboration Service Model for a Global Port Cluster

The importance of port clusters to a global city may be viewed from a number of perspectives. The development of port clusters and economies of agglomeration and their contribution to a regional economy is underpinned by information and physical infrastructure that facilitates collaboration between business entities within the cluster. The maturity of technologies providing portals, web and middleware services provides an opportunity to push the boundaries of contemporary service reference models and service catalogues to what the authors propose to be “collaboration services”. Servicing port clusters, portal engineers of the future must consider collaboration services to benefit a region. Particularly, service orchestration through a “public user portal” must gain better utilisation of publically owned infrastructure, to share knowledge and collaborate among organisations through information systems.

A review of emergency organisations: the need for a theoretical framework

Disaster preparedness in emergency organisations has a heritage born out of civil defence and military traditions, but response to large-scale emergency invariably involves cross-agencies, often involving civilian organisations and resources. Changes to emergency organisations are taking place, and the complexity that has evolved in organisational features is discussed in this paper, drawing upon Victoria, Australia, as an example. Effective command propagation is a critical aspect of emergency response. In attempting to evaluate different models for command and control, this research has identified the requirement for a theoretical framework, which examines the organisation as a whole as well as the intricate relationships throughout the command chain. This paper presents a survey of the research domain as a first step, leading to the need for a theoretical framework for emergency organisations to be developed.

An Ontological Health Cluster Framework

Health is a multidisciplinary domain. We contend that such a domain can benefit by being framed as a knowledge cluster. The objective of this paper is to map out a health research cluster in terms of an ontology. In this way, key relationships and informational exchanges can be captured and which enable more prudent use of critical knowledge assets within the cluster. We proffer an ontology based on our assessment of the healthcare space internationally and distillation of relevant extant literature.