With the rapid diffusion of the Internet worldwide, there has been considerable interest in the e-potentials of developing countries giving rise to a 1st generation of e-Readiness studies. Moreover, e-Readiness means different things to different people, in different contexts, and for different...

Sell Globally and Shop Globally have been seen as a potential benefit of web-enabled electronic business. One important step toward realizing this benefit is to know how things are selling in various parts of the world. A global price comparison service would address this need. But there have...

Web aggregation has been available regionally for several years, but this service has not been offered globally. As an example, using multiple regional comparison aggregators, we analyze the global prices for a Sony camcorder, which differ by more than three times. We further explain that lack...

With the increasing use of the Internet, many of us feel strongly about the free and unfettered exchange and use of information. But the actual situation is not that simple. After the European Union adopted the Database Directive to provide legal protection for non-copyrightable database...

In its Preface, The 9/11 Commission Report states: We learned that the institutions charted with protecting ... national security did not understand how grave this threat can be, and did not adjust their policies, plans, and practices to deter or defeat it (2004: xvi). Given current realities...

The underlying assumptions for interpreting the meaning of data often change over time, which further complicates the problem of semantic heterogeneities among autonomous data sources. As an extension to the Context Interchange (COIN) framework, this paper introduces the notion of temporal...

Changes of semantics in data sources further complicate the semantic heterogeneity problem. We identify four types of semantic heterogeneities related to changing semantics and present a solution based on an extension to the Context Interchange (COIN) framework. Changing semantics is represented...

The change in meaning of data over time poses significant challenges for the use of that data. These challenges exist in the use of an individual data source and are further compounded with the integration of multiple sources. In this paper, we identify three types of temporal semantic...

The National Research Council has noted that although there are many private and public databases that contain information potentially relevant to counterterrorism programs, they lack the necessary context definitions (i.e., metadata) and access tools to enable interoperation with other...

The convergence of three distinct but interconnected trends - unrelenting globalization, growing worldwide electronic connectivity, and increasing knowledge intensity of economic activity - is creating powerful new opportunities and challenges for global politics. This rapidly changing...