[AISWorld] Journal of Database Management (JDM) 21(4)

Fri Oct 22 16:09:31 EDT 2010

The contents of the latest issue of:
Journal of Database Management (JDM)
Official Publication of the Information Resources Management Association
Volume 21, Issue 4, October-December 2010
Published: Quarterly in Print and Electronically
ISSN: 1063-8016 EISSN: 1533-8010
Published by IGI Publishing, Hershey-New York, USA
www.igi-global.com/jdm

Editor-in-Chief: Keng Siau, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA

RESEARCH COMMENTARY

Co-Creation and Collaboration in a Virtual World: A 3D Visualization 
Design Project in Second Life

Keng Siau, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA
Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA
Brian E. Mennecke, Iowa State University, USA
Shu Z. Schiller, Wright State University, USA

One of the most successful and useful implementations of 3D virtual worlds 
is in the area of education and training. This paper discusses the use of 
virtual worlds in education and describes an innovative 3D visualization 
design project using one of the most popular virtual worlds, Second Life. 
This ongoing project is a partnership between IBM and three universities 
in the United States: the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Iowa State 
University, and Wright State University. More than 400 MBA students have 
participated in this project by completing a creative design project that 
involves co-creation and collaboration in Second Life. The MBA students 
from the three universities worked in pairs to create designs to represent 
concepts related to IBM Power Systems, a family of IBM servers. The paper 
discusses observations and reflections on the 3D visualization design 
project. The paper concludes with a discussion of future research 
directions in applying virtual worlds in education.

RESEARCH PAPER ONE

Transforming Activity-Centric Business Process Models into 
Information-Centric Models for SOA Solutions

Rong Liu, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA
Frederick Y. Wu, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA
Santhosh Kumaran, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA

Much of the prior work in business process modeling is activity-centric. 
Recently, an information-centric approach has emerged, where a business 
process is modeled as the interacting lifecycles of business entities. The 
benefits of this approach are documented in a number of case studies. In 
this paper, the authors formalize the information-centric approach and 
derive the relationships between the two approaches. The authors formally 
define the notion of a business entity, provide an algorithm to transform 
an activity-centric model into an information-centric process model, and 
demonstrate the equivalence between these two models. Further, they show 
the value of transforming from the activity-centric paradigm to the 
information-centric paradigm in business process componentization and 
Service-Oriented Architecture design and also provide an empirical 
evaluation.

RESEARCH PAPER TWO

An Integrated Query Relaxation Approach Adopting Data Abstraction and 
Fuzzy Relation

Soon-Young Huh, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Korea
Kae-Hyun Moon, Samsung Electronics Co., Korea
Jinsoo Park, Seoul National University, Korea

This paper proposes a cooperative query answering approach that relaxes 
query conditions to provide approximate answers by utilizing similarity 
relationships between data values. The proposed fuzzy abstraction 
hierarchy (FAH) represents a similarity relationship based on the 
integrated notion of data abstraction and fuzzy relations. Based on FAH, 
the authors develop query relaxation operators like query generalization, 
approximation, and specialization of a value. Compared with existing 
approaches, FAH supports more effective information retrieval by 
processing various kinds of cooperative queries through elaborate 
relaxation control and providing ranked query results according to fitness 
scores. Moreover, FAH reduces maintenance cost by decreasing the number of 
similarity relationships to be managed.

RESEARCH PAPER THREE

Accelerating Web Service Workflow Execution via Intelligent Allocation of 
Services to Servers

Konstantinos Stamkopoulos, University of Ioannina, Greece
Evaggelia Pitoura, University of Ioannina, Greece
Panos Vassiliadis, University of Ioannina, Greece
Apostolos Zarras, University of Ioannina, Greece

The appropriate deployment of web service operations at the service 
provider site plays a critical role in the efficient provision of services 
to clients. In this paper, the authors assume that a service provider has 
several servers over which web service operations can be deployed. Given a 
workflow of web services and the topology of the servers, the most 
efficient mapping of operations to servers must then be discovered. 
Efficiency is measured in terms of two cost functions that concern the 
execution time of the workflow and the fairness of the load distribution 
among the servers. The authors study different topologies for the workflow 
structure and the server connectivity and propose a suite of greedy 
algorithms for each combination.

RESEARCH NOTE ONE

Matching Attributes Across Overlapping Heterogeneous Data Sources Using 
Mutual Information

Huimin Zhao, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA

Identifying matching attributes across heterogeneous data sources is a 
critical and time-consuming step in integrating the data sources. In this 
paper, the author proposes a method for matching the most frequently 
encountered types of attributes across overlapping heterogeneous data 
sources. The author uses mutual information as a unified measure of 
dependence on various types of attributes. An example is used to 
demonstrate the utility of the proposed method, which is useful in 
developing practical attribute matching tools.

RESEARCH NOTE TWO

Disclosure Control of Confidential Data by Applying PAC Learning Theory

Ling He, Saginaw Valley State University, USA
Haldun Aytug, University of Florida, USA
Gary J. Koehler, University of Florida, USA

This paper examines privacy protection in a statistical database from the 
perspective of an intruder using learning theory to discover private 
information. With the rapid development of information technology, massive 
data collection is relatively easier and cheaper than ever before. The 
challenge is how to provide database users with reliable and useful data 
while protecting the privacy of the confidential information. This paper 
discusses how to prevent disclosing the identity of unique records in a 
statistical database. The authors’ research extends previous work and 
shows how much protection is necessary to prevent an adversary from 
discovering confidential data with high probability at small error.

*****************************************************
For full copies of the above articles, check for this issue of the Journal 
of Database Management (JDM) in your institution's library. This journal 
is also included in the IGI Global aggregated "InfoSci-Journals" database: 
http://www.igi-global.com/EResources/InfoSciJournals.aspx. 
*****************************************************

CALL FOR PAPERS

Mission of JDM:

The Journal of Database Management (JDM) publishes original research on 
all aspects of database management, design science, systems analysis and 
design, and software engineering. The primary mission of JDM is to be 
instrumental in the improvement and development of theory and practice 
related to information technology, information systems, and management of 
knowledge resources. The journal is targeted at both academic researchers 
and practicing IT professionals.

Coverage of JDM:

·       Agile systems development 
·       Bio-informatics 
·       Cognitive modeling 
·       Component engineering 
·       Conceptual modeling 
·       Data quality 
·       Data warehousing and data mining 
·       Database for advanced applications 
·       Database management and administration 
·       Database models and query languages 
·       Database security and integrity 
·       Design science 
·       Domain-driven development 
·       E-business and m-commerce models and architectures 
·       Empirical software engineering 
·       Enterprise systems and supply chain integration 
·       Extreme modeling and extreme programming 
·       Geographical information systems 
·       Human-computer interaction 
·       Heterogeneous and distributed database 
·       Information and knowledge modeling 
·       Intelligent agents and agent-based applications 
·       Knowledge engineering and management 
·       Method engineering and metamodeling 
·       Object oriented methods and methodologies 
·       Requirements engineering 
·       Service-oriented architecture/service-oriented computing 
·       Semantic Web and ontology 
·       Software engineering 
·       System analysis and design 
·       Unified modeling language and unified process 
·       Virtual team and Web 2.0 
·       Web database and Web-based information systems 
·       Web design methods and methodologies

Interested authors should consult the journal's manuscript submission 
guidelines at www.igi-global.com/jdm. 

All inquiries and submissions should be sent to:
Editor-in-Chief: Dr. Keng Siau at jdm at unlnotes.unl.edu
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.aisnet.org/pipermail/aisworld_lists.aisnet.org/attachments/20101022/8631e55f/attachment.html>