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Rather than organize as traditional firms, many of today’s companies organize as platforms that sit at the nexus of multiple exchange and production relationships. This chapter considers a most basic question of organization in platform contexts: the choice of boundaries. Herein, I investigate how classical economic theories of firm boundaries apply to platform-based organization and empirically study how executives made boundary choices in response to changing market and technical challenges in the early mobile computing industry (the predecessor to today’s smartphones). Rather than a strict or unavoidable tradeoff between “openness-versus-control,” most successful platform owners chose their boundaries in a way to simultaneously open-up to outside developers while maintaining coordination across the entire system.

This paper aims to examine the process for estimation of efforts for software development and suggests a framework for estimating software development costs and ensuring quality of code in e-Government projects from the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. With no established processes for estimation of efforts, the Government relied on open bids from the market to develop these e-Government applications.

The paper adopts an exploratory case study approach to analyze the e-Government applications in Andhra Pradesh. Using data from the information technology department of the Government of Andhra Pradesh, the paper evolves a framework to compute costs of software development, based on the software development life cycle.

The framework helps in arriving at a hurdle price before the tender process. The study has shown that an e-Government application in AP state would cost Rs. 224,000, or US$2,969.25, for a simple application, and Rs. 33,60,000, or US$44,538.71, for a complex application over a five-year period, depending on the complexity and size of the application. This information would be useful to the Government decision-makers for expanding e-Government.

Further research may assess the utility of this framework for e-Government support activities like automation of data centers, video conferencing facilities and ushering in financial technologies for encouraging cashless payments.

The paper provides information that could be of value at a national level (for India) and at the same time providing a guide for other countries that would like to adopt this framework.

The development of mobile applications in multiple clouds environment is a complex task because of the lack of platform standards in cloud computing and mobile computing. The source code involves various proprietary programming libraries for different platforms. However, functionalities are inevitably changed over time, as well as the platform. Therefore, a great deal of development effort is required, when changes need to be made at functional and platform level. This paper aims to propose SIMON, a framework that eases complexity of the development to support software evolution.

SIMON shields the developer from the complexity of mobile and cloud platforms in the development of mobile applications in multiple clouds environment. The framework uses model of application design to automate the development and support execution of mobile applications in system environment that needs integration to the number of data sources located on multiple clouds. The framework is composed of prefabricated components that support function changeability and platform adaptability.

The framework is examined with the development of a sample application. After it is evaluated with scenarios that involve changing at functional and platform levels, the result shows significant reducing of the development effort by comparing with the other approaches.

The framework facilitates the implementation of mobile applications in the software system that involves integration to multiple clouds, and it supports software evolution with lesser development effort.

The aim of this paper is to present the effectiveness of participatory information and communication technology (ICT) tools for urban planning, in particular, supporting bottom-up decision-making in urban management and governance.

This work begins with a presentation on the state of the art literature on the existing participatory approaches and their contribution to urban planning and the policymaking process. Furthermore, a case study, namely, the UrbanAPI project, is selected to identify new visualisation and simulation tools applied at different urban scales. These tools are applied in four different European cities – Vienna, Bologna, Vitoria-Gasteiz and Ruse – with the objective to identify the data needs for application development, commonalities in requirements of such participatory tools and their expected impact in policy and decision-making processes.

The case study presents three planning applications: three-dimensional Virtual Reality at neighbourhood scale, Public Motion Explorer at city-wide scale and Urban Growth Simulation at city-region scale. UrbanAPI applications indicate both active and passive participation secured by applying these tools at different urban scales and hence facilitate evidence-based urban planning decision-making. Structured engagement with the city administrations indicates commonalities in user needs and application requirements creating the potential for the development of generic features in these ICT tools which can be applied to many other cities throughout Europe.

This paper presents new ICT-enabled participatory urban planning tools at different urban scales to support collaborative decision-making and urban policy development. Various technologies are used for the development of these IT tools and applied to the real environment of four European cities.

Cloud manufacturing (CMfg) is a networked manufacturing mode that promotes the agile, service-oriented, green and intelligent development of the manufacturing industry. Although some scholars have reviewed related studies of CMfg from multiple perspectives, these reviews are not fully systematic or well justified and fail to fully reveal the key characteristics in the development process of CMfg. The purpose of this paper is to systematically review the relevant research on CMfg via identification of key characteristics of definition, architecture, supporting technology and application of CMfg to provide critical information in decision support for the innovation and development of CMfg.

This study systematically reviews the relevant research on CMfg across theoretical methods to technical applications by integrating quantitative and qualitative methods. Word cloud method is used to quantitatively analyse the structure and feature of different definitions of CMfg. The principle of System Science is used to explore the basic components and functions of various CMfg architectures and their common and differing characteristics. A multi-level technology framework is developed to explore the development status of CMfg supporting technologies. A multi-stage application classification is proposed to reveal the application status of CMfg.

Through literature review, this study found that CMfg architecture is currently dominated by general architectures and lacks architectures that fit the actual enterprise characteristics; CMfg supporting technology is mature in the traditional cloud computing-based technology, but it is still weak in the development of virtualization and servitization technology, service scheduling technology; CMfg application is still in the initial stage and still lacks a relatively complete system application. By analysing the development status of CMfg, this study also identified potential research directions of CMfg in information management, service composition and evaluation, system application and sustainable development and other aspects.

This paper predominantly focuses on journal articles and some key conference papers published in English and Chinese. Chinese articles account for more than half of the total. The reason is that CMfg was proposed by the Chinese and CMfg is suitable for the development of China's manufacturing industry because of China's intelligent manufacturing environment. It is believed that this research has reached a reliable comprehensiveness that can help scholars and practitioners establish new research directions and evaluate their work in CMfg.

Prior literature reviews ignore the identification and analysis of key feature identification for the current development of CMfg, including common and unique feature identification of different CMfg architectures and functions, multi-layer analysis and interpretation of CMfg technology and different stage analysis of CMfg applications. This study addresses these limitations and provides a comprehensive literature review.

States that the rate of change of Internet technology is alarmingly high. The main question addressed in this article is: how can organizations cope whose main activities are not Internet‐technology related? METANET is a framework containing the concepts required to keep pace with the rapid evolution of Web applications. It has four main components: development, maintenance, tools architecture and organizational fit. A typology of Web applications and the development method allows IT departments to determine what types of Web applications they are ready to develop. Content maintenance models are set out. The necessary organizational structure is discussed. An architecture for efficient and productive corporate development tools is set out. To illustrate the concepts a prototype repository is discussed.

This paper aims to present a case study of the Metamorphosis process in the development of a mobile application based on an existing web information system.

The paper presents the design and execution of a case study to investigate the feasibility of using the Metamorphosis process to create mobile applications based on existing web information systems. This case study reports the development of a mobile version from SIGEventos web information system.

The use of Metamorphosis process for the development of SIGEventos Mobile, based on SIGEventos web version, allowed the investigation of the feasibility of it on creation of mobile applications based on existing web information systems. This process was considered useful for creating mobile applications based on existing information systems.

This paper presents a case study of Metamorphosis process.

Explains that a corporate Web application is a corporate information system that uses World Wide Web technology to provide easy access to a wide variety of corporate information resources for internal and external users on a wide variety of platforms in geographically distributed locations. Corporate Web applications go beyond corporate web pages in that they serve a specific set of business objectives beyond providing a presence on the World Wide Web. As with all types of information systems, there are two approaches to Web application development: top‐down and evolutionary. Evolutionary development is exploratory and appropriate for learning about the technology and the application domain. However, evolutionary development leads to complex applications that are difficult to use and difficult to maintain. Top‐down development organizes the complexity of these applications and produces applications that can: meet business objectives; be developed by a programming team; and be maintained by people other than the developers. Provides a methodology for top‐down development of corporate Web applications.

This purpose of this paper is to present ISML-MDE, a model-driven environment that includes ISML, a platform-independent modeling language for enterprise applications; ISML-GEN, a code generation framework to automatically generate code from models; and LionWizard, a tool to automatically integrate different components into a unified codebase.

The development comprises five stages: standardizing architecture; refactoring and adapting existing components; automating their integration; developing a modeling language; and creating code generators. After development, model-to-code ratios in ISML-MDE are measured for different applications.

The average model-to-code ratio is approximately 1:4.6 when using the code generators from arbitrary models. If a model transformation is performed previously to the code generation, this ratio raises to 1:115. The current validation efforts show that ISML properly supports several DSL essential characteristics described by Kahraman and Bilgen (2015).

ISML-MDE was tested on relatively small applications. Further validation of the approach requires measurement of development times and their comparison with previous similar projects, to determine the gains in productivity.

The value of ISML-MDE can be summarized as follows: ISML-MDE has the potential to significantly reduce development times, because of an adequate use of models and transformations. The design of ISML-MDE addresses real-world development requirements, obtained from a tight interaction between the researchers and the software development company. The underlying process has been thoroughly documented and it is believed it can be used as a reference for future developments of MDE tools under similar conditions.

Ubiquitous web applications (UWA) are a new type of web applications which are accessed in various contexts, i.e. through different devices, by users with various interests, at anytime from anyplace around the globe. For such full‐fledged, complex software systems, a methodologically sound engineering approach in terms of model‐driven engineering (MDE) is crucial. Several modeling approaches have already been proposed that capture the ubiquitous nature of web applications, each of them having different origins, pursuing different goals and providing a pantheon of concepts. This paper aims to give an in‐depth comparison of seven modeling approaches supporting the development of UWAs.

This methodology is conducted by applying a detailed set of evaluation criteria and by demonstrating its applicability on basis of an exemplary tourism web application. In particular, five commonly found ubiquitous scenarios are investigated, thus providing initial insight into the modeling concepts of each approach as well as to facilitate their comparability.

The results gained indicate that many modeling approaches lack a proper MDE foundation in terms of meta‐models and tool support. The proposed modeling mechanisms for ubiquity are often limited, since they neither cover all relevant context factors in an explicit, self‐contained, and extensible way, nor allow for a wide spectrum of extensible adaptation operations. The provided modeling concepts frequently do not allow dealing with all different parts of a web application in terms of its content, hypertext, and presentation levels as well as their structural and behavioral features. Finally, current modeling approaches do not reflect the crosscutting nature of ubiquity but rather intermingle context and adaptation issues with the core parts of a web application, thus hampering maintainability and extensibility.

Different from other surveys in the area of modeling web applications, this paper specifically considers modeling concepts for their ubiquitous nature, together with an investigation of available support for MDD in a comprehensive way, using a well‐defined as well as fine‐grained catalogue of more than 30 evaluation criteria.