Authors:
Paperback, 400 pages
Publisher: Larstan Publishing
Publication Date: 2006-05-05


Reviews :

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Authors:
Hardcover, 383 pages
Publisher: Springer
Publication Date: 2006-08-03
Edition: 1

Reviews :

   

Semantics, Web services, and Web processes promise better re-use, universal interoperability and integration. Semantics has been recognized as the primary tool to address the challenges of a broad spectrum of heterogeneity and for improving automation through machine understandable descriptions.

Semantic Web Services, Processes and Applications brings contributions from researchers who study, explore and understand the semantic enabling of all phases of semantic Web processes. This encompasses design, annotation, discovery, choreography and composition. Also this book presents fundamental capabilities and techniques associated with ontological modeling or services, annotation, matching and mapping, and reasoning. This is complemented by discussion of applications in e-Government and bioinformatics.

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...

Authors: Priscilla M. Regan.
Hardcover, 332 pages
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Publication Date: 1995-09


Reviews :

    This study of legislative attempts to reconcile privacy and technology, examines congressional policy making in three areas: computerized databases, wiretapping, and polygraph testing. It argues for an expanded understanding of social privacy, to achieve greater protection from emerging technology....

Authors:
Hardcover, 280 pages
Publisher: Praeger Publishers
Publication Date: 1991-11-30


Reviews :

    Electronic services networks--systems of terminals and computers linked by telecommunication apparatus and used to process transactions--have had an increasing influence on industrial structures and commercial practices over the past decade. Margaret Guerin-Calvert and Steven Wildman have assembled diverse essays representing the best of current thinking on these networks. The book provides the reader with varied theoretical perspectives on ESNs and their effects on business and finance and contains five case studies that apply these theoretical ideas to issues raised by the proliferation of these networks. Unlike other works, which have focused on ESNs as features of specific industries, this collection explores the networks themselves as economic phenomena. The contributions are grouped into two parts. The first presents general theoretical perspectives on the economics of various ESNs, their effects on the industries and markets that employ them, and the policy issues they raise. Among the topics discussed are structural relationships among ESNs, their effect on organizational structures, compatibility between shared networks, and competitive search facilitation. In Part II, the contributors offer a detailed look at the economic policy histories of ESNs in specific industries, including banking, real estate, airlines, and travel. There are discussions of automatic teller machines, computer reservation systems, multiple-listing services, and electronic data interchange. These studies demonstrate the incredible variety of applications of ESN technology and make this an indispensable resource for professionals in all types of businesses that use or could use ESNs, as well as for students in a wide range of law, business, and public policy courses....

Authors: Kevin A. Hughes, John E. Hill.
Paperback, 224 pages
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication Date: 1998-04-28


Reviews :

    Cyberpolitics goes beyond the hype to analyze the content of political discussion on the Internet and to see how the Internet is being used politically. Empirical research translated into dozens of graphically compelling figures and tables illuminates for the first time Internet characteristics heretofore only speculated about: Who are the cybercitizens using the Internet, how do they participate in the political process, and who uses the Internet most effectively to accomplish political ends? The authors' conclusion should be reassuring to Internet utopians and dystopians alike: As the Internet grows, it will change the nature of political action, discourse, and effect less than it will itself be changed by politics. Along the way, we learn a lot about politics on the Internet and off in the U.S. and around the world; left, right, and center. Visit our website for sample chapters!...

    Hill and Hughes conducted extensive research online attempting to answer a basic question about the role of the Internet in the political scene: how do regular citizens actually use the Internet to discuss politics? In their research, they found a number of surprising things. For example, the lasting political content of the Internet is primarily conservative, yet when ongoing interaction is monitored it turns out that liberals outnumber conservatives among the actual users.

Among the various issues they faced in their research was determining who the users and content providers actually are. How do people tend to interact both in asynchronous political conversation--such as posting on bulletin boards or conversing through e-mail--and in such real-time communication as Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and America Online chat? They explored how political communities form online and what differences there are between U.S.-based and international communities. They looked as well at the question of how the fully open nature of the Internet, where anyone can provide information or misinformation based on any level of knowledge, can both promote and interfere with the functioning of a democratic system. Among the primary points to emerge from their study is that, while the Internet will grow to play a vital role in government, it is unlikely to change the nature of politics in any profound manner. On the other hand, as more people find their virtual homes and voices online, politics may have a profound influence on the nature of Internet discourse. This is a scholarly book (though not laden with a dense, academic style) loaded with thought-provoking observations. A wide variety of charts and graphs make the research results easier to follow. --Elizabeth Lewis...

Authors:
Hardcover, 305 pages
Publisher: Springer
Publication Date: 2003-11-13
Edition: 1

Reviews :

    The Real and Virtual Worlds of Spatial Planning brings together contributions from leaders in landscape, transportation, and urban planning today. The authors present an international range of case studies - from Europe, Australia, North America, Asia and Africa - that ground the exploration of ideas in the realities of sustainable urban and regional planning, landscape planning and present the prospects for using virtual worlds for modeling spatial environments and their application in planning. The first part of this volume explores the challenges for planning in the real world that are caused by the dynamics of socio-spatial systems as well as by the contradictions of their evolutionary trends related to their spatial layout. Case studies from developed as well as developing countries are presented. The second part presents diverse concepts to model, analyze, visualize, monitor and control socio-spatial systems by using virtual worlds. Theoretical topics include modeling spatial systems such as Petri nets, cellular automata as well as dynamical systems....

Authors: Gregory Tassey.
Hardcover, 264 pages
Publisher: Quorum Books
Publication Date: 1997-11-30


Reviews :

    Industry officials and government policymakers have for some time decried the lack of a framework for establishing and defending Research and Development (R&D) policies. Effective policy requires an understanding of the underlying economics. This book offers models and analysis of the economic elements that drive technology-based growth and compares U.S. policies with those used in Europe and Japan. The results of these models and analysis is a framework for matching various forms of underinvestment with efficient strategic and policy responses. This enables industry and government R&D initiatives to be developed, analyzed, and implemented with greater success than previously attained....

Authors: Whitfield Diffie. Susan Landau.
Paperback, 366 pages
Publisher: The MIT Press
Publication Date: 1999-02-26


Reviews :

    1999 IEEE-USAB Award for Distinguished Literary Contributions Furthering Public Understanding of the Profession. and Winner of the 1998 Donald McGannon Award for Social and Ethical Relevance in Communication Policy Research

Telecommunication has never been perfectly secure, as a Cold War culture of wiretaps and international spying taught us. Yet many of us still take our privacy for granted, even as we become more reliant than ever on telephones, computer networks, and electronic transactions of all kinds. Whitfield Diffie and Susan Landau argue that if we are to retain the privacy that characterized face-to-face relationships in the past, we must build the means of protecting that privacy into our communication systems.

Diffie and Landau strip away the hype surrounding the policy debate to examine the national security, law enforcement, commercial, and civil liberties issues. They discuss the social function of privacy, how it underlies a democratic society, and what happens when it is lost....

    There was a time when cryptography--the making and breaking of secret codes--was of interest only to spies, diplomats, and the occasional eccentric. Those days are over, and the reason, as Diffie and Landau explain, is that secret codes have become the key to preserving traditional notions of privacy at a time when technology is rapidly altering the nature of human communication.

When the vast majority of conversations happened face to face, keeping them private was a simple matter of stepping away from the listening crowd. But the growing number of conversations that take place over easy-to-intercept phone lines and e-mail channels requires more sophisticated safeguards. Above all, it requires online encryption tools of the highest grade, and this book does a good job of explaining how these tools work, both in principle and in practice. It does a better job, though, of explaining why the tools matter. The intense political battles that have surrounded digital cryptography in recent years are a testament to the profound political implications of privacy in the online era, and Diffie and Landau have delivered an admirably thorough overview of both the struggles and the stakes. If at times their thoroughness bogs them down in dry recitations of detail, their book at least generates more light than heat, and that can hardly be said of most contributions to the cryptography debate so far. --Julian Dibbell ...

Authors:
Paperback, 451 pages
Publisher: The MIT Press
Publication Date: 2001-04-16


Reviews :

    In Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias, Peter Ludlow extends the approach he used so successfully in High Noon on the Electronic Frontier, offering a collection of writings that reflects the eclectic nature of the online world, as well as its tremendous energy and creativity. This time the subject is the emergence of governance structures within online communities and the visions of political sovereignty shaping some of those communities. Ludlow virtual communities as laboratories for conducting experiments in the construction of new societies and governance structures. While many online experiments will fail, Ludlow argues that given the synergy of the online world, new and superior governance structures may emerge. Indeed, utopian visions are not out of place, provided that we understand the new utopias to be fleeting localized "islands in the Net" and not permanent institutions.

The book is organized in five sections. The first section considers the sovereignty of the Internet. The second section asks how widespread access to resources such as Pretty Good Privacy and anonymous remailers allows the possibility of "Crypto Anarchy"—essentially carving out space for activities that lie outside the purview of nation states and other traditional powers. The third section shows how the growth of e-commerce is raising questions of legal jurisdiction and taxation for which the geographic boundaries of nation-states are obsolete. The fourth section looks at specific experimental governance structures evolved by online communities. The fifth section considers utopian and anti-utopian visions for cyberspace.

Contributors:
Richard Barbrook, John Perry Barlow, William E. Baugh Jr., David S. Bennahum, Hakim Bey, David Brin, Andy Cameron, Dorothy E. Denning, Mark Dery, Kevin Doyle, Duncan Frissell, Eric Hughes, Karrie Jacobs, David Johnson, Peter Ludlow, Timothy C. May, Jennifer L. Mnookin, Nathan Newman, David G. Post, Jedediah S. Purdy, Charles J. Stivale....

    Freedom's not dead in cyberspace. That's the premise of philosopher Peter Ludlow and most of the contributors to his Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias, and it's hard to argue otherwise after reading it. Deliberately freeing the volume from the shackles of academic rigor (and jargon), Ludlow draws deeply from the cyber-underground and mixes classic rants with post-millennial realism. From John Perry Barlow's chestnut "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" to Jedediah Purdy's cautionary "The God of the Digerati," the collection is direct, confrontational, and thought-provoking.

Though the topic of virtual communities has been thoroughly explored elsewhere, the possibility of spaces free from terrestrial jurisdiction--called "Temporary Autonomous Zones" by Hakim Bey--has not yet penetrated mainstream thought. Strong encryption and essential qualities of the Internet--like portability--ensure that such utopias will remain theoretically and practically tenable through the foreseeable future, and Ludlow's visionaries want to see them flower. The penultimate section on experimental governing systems and the appended interview with Noam Chomsky demolishing widely held beliefs about anarchy crown the book with deep thinking about issues vital to the future of freedom--online and off. It's exciting to see this work get the widespread attention it deserves--with any luck, the iconic Net user will soon trade in the pocket protector for an eye patch. --Rob Lightner ...

Authors: Tony Dale. Shaun Goldfinch.
Paperback, 160 pages
Publisher: Otago University Press
Publication Date: 2006-08-04


Reviews :

    Information and the technology that supports its collection, communication and analysis is a core concern of modern government, making e-government (meaning electronically enabled government) fundamental to the ongoing 'reinvention' of public administration. But the quest for e-government opens up a range of issues - whether to take a 'big bang' or an incremental approach to computerisation, how to deal with security and privacy concerns, how to reconfigure the machinery of government to fit ICT practices - and decisions - hardware and software procurement, software architecture, access by whom to what. The spending of public money is always intriguing and perhaps money spent on ICT has been the most intriguing of all, with some spectacular failures costing millions. This book is written for a general audience and takes a critical look at policies, problems and prospects for e-government in a series of case studies. Why have ICT failures in the public sector occurred and what lessons do they provide for the future?...