Maria A. Lambrou

A Methodological Approach for Defining One-Stop e-Government Service Offerings

This paper reports some methodological guidelines for categorizing administrative services on certain typological characteristics (informational vs. transactional content, acquaintance vs. operational usefulness, local vs. hyper-local value), defining one-stop service offerings and ranking their interest from an end-user as well as service integration perspective.

An Extended Risk Assessment Model for Secure E-Government Projects

In this article we propose a model for a risk assessment tool directed towards and tailored specifically for e-government projects. Our goal is to cover the particular threats pertinent to an e-government project context and provide an interface between the broader philosophy of IT governance frameworks and the technical risk assessment methodologies, thus aiding in the successful and secure implementation and operation of e-government infrastructures. The model incorporates a wide range of applicable risk factors and seven accompanying dimensions, assembled into a checklist-like matrix, along with an application algorithm and associated indices, which an evaluator can use to calculate risk.

Enhancing the TINA Architectural Framework for Personal Mobility Support

In this paper, extensions to the Telecommunications Information Networking Architecture (TINA) derived from personal mobility requirements are presented. The paper reflects the vision of the EC/ACTS research project DOLMEN that is developing OSAM, an Open Service Architecture for fixed and Mobile environments. The paper takes into account requirements to support personal mobility in a multi-provider environment, as well as requirements to distinguish user information from terminal information according to the basic principle that, in a personal mobility support environment, a user can dynamically be associated to different terminals for different services. According to these requirements, an enhanced TINA Business Model, and the impact on and extensions to the computational model of the TINA Service Architecture are elaborated.

Managing port e-services in a socio-technical context

The paper presents a theoretical framework and an empirical examination of the provision of port e-services through exploratory research. The presented survey examines the socio-technical environment in which port e-services are developed and provided, as well as the related investment decision making and evaluation procedures, in the Greek port sector. A number of hindering and enabling management and organisational factors are identified towards fully exploiting ICT capabilities and port e-services; our framework is deemed to be applicable to ports with similar geopolitical, economic, industrial and management characteristics to those of the examined organisations. The research outcome is a first step towards the provision of a systematic, unified framework for analysing and planning port e-services initiatives, in a socio-technical context.

Evaluation of electronic maritime services using fuzzy logic techniques

Our paper proposes an innovative methodological approach in order to evaluate e-business services. We assume a Multicriteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) framework, where sets of general and domain-specific criteria are used to judge the relative performance of e-services under evaluation. In this paper we present the main characteristics of the evaluation framework, including the assessment of the evaluation criteria and their relative importance, the evaluation of the performance and the final ranking of e-services. The proposed methodology has the innovative feature of embodying techniques of fuzzy logic theory into the classical multicriteria decision analysis. We present an application of our methodology in the maritime sector where we assume an e-services platform model, which supports operational and commercial activities of shipping companies on the internet. In the presented case study, we apply the proposed methodology in order to evaluate six electronic maritime services using totally 16 criteria.

Secure PKI-enabled e-government infrastructures implementation: the SYZEFXIS-PKI case

In this paper, we address the key issues of trust, identity management and privacy, within the context of a modern, secure, Public Key Infrastructure- (PKI-) based e-government model. Firstly, we review the basic concepts, standards, methodological tools, critical success factors and international experience for designing and implementing PKI-based secure electronic services. We build on this by presenting a case study of a contextualised technology and process solution, namely the SYZEFXIS-PKI case, a nation-wide ongoing initiative aimed to provide a modern ICT infrastructure for the Greek Public Administration (GPA). Our goal is to communicate lessons learnt from the development, implementation and delivery of a national PKI-based environment, its repercussions and the critical success factors for its widespread use and effectiveness, as a major step towards the realisation of a secure e-governance model in Greece. Finally, we discuss the new modern vision of trust, identity management and privacy in the context of electronic governance and we postulate on future developments.

Advancing the one-stop shop e-government paradigm

In this paper, we describe the features of an advanced e-government model, namely the one-stop shop scheme, which promotes the seamless aggregation, matching and added value service provision in the public administration realm. Moreover, we propose certain extensions and future provisions that will enable the transition to next generation e-government services and infrastructures. The counterpart organizational model dimensions are discussed.

Development of an e-Learning Recommender System Using Discrete Choice Models and Bayesian Theory: A Pilot Case in the Shipping Industry

The field of e-learning and self-learning has rapidly evolved during the past decade mainly because of major advances in telecommunications and information technologies, in particular the widespread use of web and mobile applications. Furthermore, the work environment conditions in most industries have become extremely demanding and competitive; therefore various forms of life-long learning appear to play an important role for employees’ career development, as well as for companies’ productivity improvement and human resources’ efficiency. The flexibility, and cost effectiveness that e-learning offers is very significant, in most cases.

An Integrated Methodology for the Evaluation of Electronic Port Services

This article introduces a formal evaluation methodology for IT investments specifically designed to cope with the needs of port industry. Port industry is a service-oriented industry and, as such, is characterised by the intangible nature of benefits. The goal of this paper is to develop a methodology for the evaluation of container terminal related electronic services that incorporates both strategic and analytic evaluation techniques for performing both ex-ante and ex-post evaluation. Port industry is an interesting case because, although it is characterised by intense competition and ports have to concentrate in satisfying the customers’ needs by proving value added services with the use of advanced information and communication technologies (ICT), it is also characterised by a lag in adopting new technologies and techniques compared to other industries. In this paper, the authors present an analysis of the industry’s specific needs and proposes a dynamic evaluation methodology specifically designed to satisfy them.

A Multi-Agent System for e-Chartering

Electronic business and agents are among the most important and exciting areas of research and development in information and communication technology, with considerable potential impact and opportunities for the maritime sector. This paper proposes the design of a multi-agent system for internet virtual chartering markets (MAVCM). The MAVCM system applies for business-to-business transactions in maritime markets, and provides mechanisms for Internet-based chartering informational and transactional services. The lifecycle of the proposed system offers a solution for efficiently handling the processes involving a charterer who owns the cargo and employs a shipbroker to find a shipowner to deliver the cargo for a certain freight rate. The objective is to enable maritime market participants to electronically charter, trade and transport cargos based on information and transactions over Internet via their software agents. The roles of the identified MAVCM software agents as well as the processes of the involved agents in a chartering application scenario are described. Agent methodologies and technologies for the analysis and the design of an e-chartering system are presented. The GAIA methodology and A-UMI have been used in the design methodology employed and have been applied for the visual specification of the present pilot application scenario.Password authentication is widely used in e-business because of its inexpensiveness, easy implementation, and user-friendliness. To resist stolen-verifier attacks, many verifier-free remote user password authentication schemes have been proposed. In 2004, Ku and Chen showed that an efficient verifier-free remote user password authentication proposed by Chien, Jan, and Tseng is flawed and then described an improved version. Recently, Yoon, Ryu, and Yoo pointed out that Ku-Chen s scheme is vulnerable to two attacks, and then proposed a slightly modified version. Unfortunately, Yoon- Ryu-Yoo s modified scheme is impractical. Herein, we propose a new verifier-free remote user password authentication scheme that is more secure and practical than existing similar schemes.