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This paper aims to propose an entity-based scientific metadata schema, i.e. Scientific Knowledge Object (SKO) Types. During the past 50 years, many metadata schemas have been developed in a variety of disciplines. However, current scientific metadata schemas focus on describing data, but not entities. They are descriptive, but few of them are structural and administrative.

To describe entities in scientific knowledge, the theory of SKO Types is proposed. SKO Types is an entity-based theory for representing and linking SKOs. It defines entities, relationships between entities and attributes of each entity in the scientific domain.

In scientific knowledge management, SKO Types serves as the basis for relating entities, entity components, aggregated entities, relationships and attributes to various tasks, e.g. linked entity, rhetorical structuring, strategic reading, semantic annotating, etc., that users may perform when consulting ubiquitous SKOs.

SKO Types can be widely applied in various digital libraries and scientific knowledge management systems, while for the existing legacy of scientific publications and their associated metadata schemas.

This study aims to investigate whether higher value creation leads to higher value appropriation and to identify the boundary conditions in a buyer–supplier relationship that can explain why a particular supplier can appropriate higher value than others.

The study uses questionnaire surveys. The sample of the survey has 150 publicly-listed supplier firms in Taiwan. The unit of analysis is the buyer–supplier relationship.

In the buyer–supplier relationship, suppliers’ bargaining power, partnership and a supplier’s original brand manufacturing (OBM) business can strengthen the positive relationship between value creation and value appropriation.

This study adopts the unilateral viewpoint of suppliers; however, some constructs might require dyadic evaluation. This study only explores the spillover effect of OBM business on the relationship between value creation and appropriation.

The spillover effect of a supplier’s OBM business in a buyer–supplier relationship allows the buyer to share more common benefits and the supplier to capture more private benefits as compensation. By broadening its customer base, a supplier can increase its bargaining power. A supplier can also maintain a strategic partnership with each essential buyer.

To avoid the dark-side effect of partnership, the model provides the contingency that a supplier can capture more value from a buyer–supplier relationship.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a comprehensive overview of current research on customer behavior in the business-to-business (B2B) context and propose a research agenda for future studies. Despite being a relatively recent area of interest for academics and practitioners, a literature review that synthesizes existing knowledge into coherent topics and outlines a research agenda for future research is still lacking.

Drawing on a systematic literature review of 219 papers and using a text-mining approach based on the Latent Dirichlet Allocation algorithm, this paper enhances the existing knowledge of B2B customer behavior and provides a descriptive analysis of the literature.

From this review, ten major research topics are found and analyzed. These topics were analyzed through the lens of the Theory, Context, Characteristics and Method framework, providing a summary of key findings from prior studies. Additionally, an integrative framework was developed, offering insights into future research directions.

This study presents a novel contribution to the field of B2B by providing a systematic review of the topic of customer behavior, filling a gap in the literature and offering a valuable resource for scholars and managers seeking to advance the field.

Digital data acquisition is crucial for operations in the digital transformation era. Reality capture (RC) has made an immeasurable contribution to various fields, especially in the built environment. This paper aims to review RC applications, potentials, limitations and the extent to which RC can be adopted for cost monitoring of construction projects.

A mixed-method approach, using Bibliometric analysis and the PRISMA framework, was used to review and analyse 112 peer-reviewed journal articles from the Scopus and Web of Science databases.

The study reveals RC has been applied in various areas in the built environment, but health and safety, cost and labour productivity monitoring have received little or no attention. It is proposed that RC can significantly support cost monitoring owing to its ability to acquire accurate and quick digital as-built 3D point cloud data, which contains rich measurement points for the valuation of work done.

The study’s conclusions are based only on the Scopus and Web of Science data sets. Only English language documents were approved, whereas others may be in other languages. The research is a non-validation of findings using empirical data to confirm the data obtained from RC literature.

This paper highlights the importance of RC for cost monitoring in construction projects, filling knowledge gaps and enhancing project outcomes.

The implementation of RC in the era of the digital revolution has the potential to improve project delivery around the world today. Every project’s success is largely determined by the availability of precise and detailed digital data. RC applications have pushed for more sustainable design, construction and operations in the built environment.

The study has given research trends on the extent of RC applications, potentials, limitations and future directions.

This paper applies the knowledge-based genetic algorithm to solve the optimization problem in complex products technological processes.

The knowledge-based genetic algorithm (KGA) is defined as a hybrid genetic algorithm (GA) which combined the GA model with the knowledge model. The GA model searches the feasible space of optimization problem based on the “neighborhood search” mechanism. The knowledge model discovers some knowledge from the previous optimization process, and applies the obtained knowledge to guide the subsequent optimization process.

The experimental results suggest that the proposed KGA is feasible and available. The effective integration of GA model and knowledge model has greatly improved the optimization performance of KGA.

The technological innovation of complex products is one of effective approaches to establish the core competitiveness in future. For this reason, the KGA is proposed to the technological processes optimization of complex products.

The purpose of this paper is to measure the efficiencies of parallel subsystems with shared inputs/outputs. Each subsystem has not only a set of common inputs and outputs, but also some dedicated inputs and outputs as well as some shared inputs and outputs. A more general data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach is proposed to deal with this efficiency evaluation issue. Based on the proposed approach, mechanisms for shared inputs/outputs distribution and efficiency decomposition among sub-units are presented.

To evaluate the efficiency of the parallel systems, this paper proposes a centralized DEA approach by assuming that the same input/output factor in a decision-making unit (DMU) has the same multiplier for all its sub-units. Furthermore, different proportions of shared inputs/outputs are imposed on sub-units within different DMUs in evaluating each DMU’s efficiency. The proposed approach is applied to evaluate the operational efficiencies of 18 railway firms in China.

By using the proposed DEA approach, the efficiencies of the whole DMU and its sub-units can be measured at the same time, and the optimal allocation strategy of shared inputs/outputs can also be obtained. The proposed model is more reasonable and robust for measuring the operational performance of parallel systems with shared inputs and outputs. The efficiency of railway system in China is relatively low, and its inefficiency is largely caused by lower freight transportation performance. Great disparities among firms can be found in the passenger transportation efficiency and freight transportation efficiency.

This study develops the DEA model under the assumption of constant returns to scale, which can be directly extended to a situation with variable returns to scale.

In this paper, the proposed approach is a more effective way to evaluate the efficiencies of parallel systems with shared inputs/outputs. With respect to the application, to improve the overall efficiency of China’s railway system, more efforts should be taken to improve its operational performance of freight transportation. Furthermore, firms’ disparities should also be considered when making these related policies.

The proposed approach can evaluate the whole DMU and its sub-units at the same time. Considering simultaneously the common/dedicated/shared inputs/outputs, the proposed approach is more general than the existing approaches in the literature. In the described approach, the same type of input or output is assumed to have the same weight for all sub-units within one DMU. More importantly, the proposed model imposes different proportions of shared inputs/outputs on different DMUs’ sub-units when measuring the efficiency for each DMU.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of selective laser sintering (SLS) method on morphology and performance of polyamide 12.

Crystallization behavior is critical to the properties of semi-crystalline polymers. The crystallization condition of SLS process is much different from others. The morphology of polyamide 12 produced by SLS technology was investigated using scanning electron microscopy, polarized light microscopy, differential scanning calorimetry, X-ray diffraction and wide-angle X-ray diffraction.

Too low fill laser power brought about bad fusion of powders, while too high energy input resulted in bad performance due to chain scission of macromolecules. There were three types of crystal in the raw powder material, denoted as overgrowth crystal, ring-banded spherulite and normal spherulite.

In this work, SLS samples with different sintering parameters, as well as compression molding sample for the purpose of comparison, were made to study the morphology and crystal structure of sintered PA12 in detail.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how to use social media in e-government to strengthen interactivity between government and the general public.

Categorizing the determinants to interactivity covering depth and breadth into two aspects that are the structural features and the content features, this study employs general linear model and ANOVA method to analyse 14,910 posts belonged to the top list of the 96 most popular government accounts of Sina, one of the largest social media platforms in China.

The main findings of the research are that both variables of the ratio of multimedia elements, and the ratio of external links have positive effects on the breadth of interactivity, while the ratio of multimedia features, and the ratio of originality have significant effects on the depth of interactivity.

The contributions are as follows. First, the authors analyse the properties and the topics of government posts to draw a rich picture of how local governments use the micro-blog as a communications channel to interact with the public. Second, the authors conceptualize the government online interactivity in terms of the breadth and depth. Third, the authors identify factors that will enhance the interactivity from two aspects: structural features and content features. Lastly, the authors offer suggestions to local governments on how to strengthen the e-government interactivity in social media.

External assistance is often urgently required when an area is struck by a catastrophe. Central government-oriented aid (CGA), national non-governmental organizations aid (NNA), and international humanitarian aid (IHA) are three typical aid models, and national counterpart aid (NCA) is an innovative model for post-Wenchuan earthquake recovery and reconstruction (PWERR). The purpose of this paper is to make a comparative study of the aid models in order to develop recommendations on external assistance for better post-disaster recovery and reconstruction (PDRR).

This study was performed in three steps: a case study on the NCA model during the PWERR; a documentary research on the CGA, NNA and IHA models; and a comparative analysis of the four models.

The results of the comparative study show that the NCA model is more efficient and effective than the other three typical aid models. However it must be based on the premise of a centralized government.

The NCA model contributes to disaster management in a developing country context. It develops a viable model for developing countries in coping with the catastrophe, can enhance their ability for domestic self-assistance, and has reference to the construction of national integrated disaster management systems.

This paper empirically researches the innovative NCA model, and compares it with commonly used aid models for the PDRR. Although it is a Chinese experience, the systematic inter-governmental collaboration of the NCA model has reference to other countries in disaster management.

The purpose of this paper is to study the decision-making behavior of the initiator and the participant under innovative and project-based tasks, respectively. It further explores the impact of the participant’s loss aversion and the initiator’s incentive level on the participant’s optimal effort level to reveal the implicit managerial mechanism.

This paper uses the Principal-agent Theory, Prospect Theory and Game Theory to study the decision-making behavior in crowdsourcing tasks. First, according to the return at the reference point, it establishes the utility function models of the participant and the initiator. Second, based on diverse loss aversion coefficient and incentive coefficient, it constructs the decision-making models of two types of task respectively. Third, it verifies the validity of models through simulation analysis.

For innovative task, the participant’s optimal effort level increases with the increment of loss aversion and incentive level, but decreases with the increase of his effort cost. For project-based task, the participant’s optimal effort level rises with the decrease of loss aversion; if the initiator does not take appropriate incentives, information asymmetry will lead to the task becoming a low-level innovation approach. Moreover, under innovative task, when the participant has loss aversion (or loss aversion reversal), his optimal effort level is higher (or lower) than that with no loss aversion, while the result under project-based task is just the opposite.

This paper characterizes two types of crowdsourcing task. Based on the prospect theory, it develops the decision-making models of the participant and the initiator under innovative and project-based tasks, thus exploring the impact of loss aversion and incentive level on their decision-making behavior. According to the findings in this paper, the initiator may effectively speculate the participant’s effort level and adopt reasonable monetary incentive measures to optimize the crowdsourcing return. In addition, this study can provide some reference for the design of incentive mechanism in crowdsourcing tasks and improve the relevant research of crowdsourcing.