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To create a benchmark for design evaluation of commercial web sites, to model customers' site navigation behavior, and to develop and implement algorithms for link‐structure personalization.

The principal methodology used for design benchmarking is a survey of corporate web sites of some US Fortune 500 companies and top Indian companies and statistical analysis of the data so collected. The principal methodological approach for modeling user behavior, user's interest and algorithms for link‐structure personalization, is the development of a Markov decision process (MDP) in the overall framework of a semi‐Markov model and implementing the same in a link‐structure personalization system.

It is observed that the functional web site features significantly differ for the sites dealing with various product categories whereas the non‐functional features do not. The over‐stressed or under‐stressed features in the Indian web sites are found. The statistics generated from the user behavior model are validated against the real life user behavior and found satisfactory. The appropriateness of the link‐structure personalization algorithms is established by comparing the set of links generated by the algorithm with the links generated by the optimal policy of the underlying MDP.

The corporate that have been considered are conglomerates offering a number of products and services. But we categorize these sites based on their major product offering. Our approach of modeling the user behavior as a semi‐Markov process is possible because of our advanced implementation infrastructure. Undesirable network effects like delays, bandwidth, etc. may not make such a model that attractive in a very traditional type of environment. But the data collected in such environment can still be mined after adequate pre‐processing and appropriate normalization

Using the benchmark proposed in this model a webmaster can evaluate his web site. The sites with low site evaluation index can be improved by adding features with high weight depending on the product offering of the company. Webmaster can design the three level information architecture described in the paper and subsequently implement link‐structure personalization algorithm to improve site navigability. Besides improving site navigability the user behavior data collected thereon can be mined to generate other valuable information.

To assess and enhance the usability of an ecommerce site our work proposes: a benchmark to evaluate commercial web site design; a stochastic model to study and understand user behavior; an algorithm to personalize link‐structure of a commercial web site, and a general framework to implement a link‐structure personalization system.

Reverse floating interest rate‐linked structured products are important innovative products for investors to achieve a relatively high yield at low interest rates, and the reasonable pricing of such products is an important factor to influence investors' needs and issuers' profits. The purpose of this paper is to empirically analyze the rationality of the pricing of reverse floating interest rate‐linked products.

This paper combines the Itô's Lemma and introduces the Black‐Derman‐Toy (BDT) model into the time‐varying volatility to build a binary tree interest rates BDT model under the time‐varying volatility, and to establish the pricing model of reverse floating interest rate‐linked products. Dozens of product data of ABN AMRO Bank and other world‐renowned banks or financial institutions are empirically analyzed.

The results show that the average pricing of these products is high, and the expected rate of return of the product is lower than the same period of the Five‐year US Treasury Bill rate.

This paper has combined the theory and practice together. The research method described in this paper is of significance to the pricing of interest rate‐linked structured products, and the pricing method of binary tree BDT model to solve the term structure of interest rates and estimation problem of volatility term structure of interest rates.

This web mining paper aims at analyzing whether the number of links pointing to a web page is biased by the structure of web sites.

By web‐design mining methods, two collections of web pages are extracted and the in‐links counts are determined by querying web search engines.

The paper finds that the structure bias and pages on a higher hierarchical level are likely to receive more links than other pages.

The links are set by web page authors whose behaviour is not yet fully understood and which requires further research.

The paper shows that the structure bias of in‐links should be considered by link analysis measures used in search engines. Potential consequences are presented.

The number of links toward a web page are considered to be an indicator for the quality of that page. This measure is biased and cannot be solely trusted as a knowledge source for the quality of a page.

Web sites are typically designed attending to a variety of criteria. However, web site structure determines browsing behavior and way‐finding results. The aim of this study is to identify the main profiles of web sites' organizational structure by modeling them as graphs and considering several social network analysis features.

A case study based on 80 institutional Spanish universities' web sites has been used for this purpose. For each root domain, two different networks have been considered: the first is the domain network, and the second is the page network. In both cases, several indicators related to social network analysis have been evaluated to characterize the web site structure. Factor analysis provides the statistical methodology to adequately extract the main web site profiles in terms of their internal structure.

This paper allows the categorization of web site design styles and provides general guidelines to assist designers to better identify areas for creating and improving institutional web sites. The findings of this study offer practical implications to web site designers for creating and maintaining an effective web presence, and for improving usability.

The research is limited to 80 institutional Spanish universities' web sites. Other institutional university web sites from different countries can be analyzed, and the conclusions could be compared or enlarged.

This paper highlights the importance of the internal web sites structure, and their implications on usability and way‐finding results. As a difference to previous research, the paper is focused on the comparison of internal structure of institutional web sites, rather than analyzing the web as a whole or the interrelations among web sites.

The purpose of this research is to present a report on Nigerian universities' use of their web sites for collaboration.

Descriptive research methodology and content analysis technique were adopted in the research. The research was undertaken through an examination of the various university web site contents and web link structures. The study relied on the Google search engine as the source of its electronic data, while manual evaluation was used to carry out content analysis. Only Nigerian universities with 500 or more web pages were considered; 15 of the 92 universities met this criterion and were subsequently sampled.

The research revealed that Nigerian universities' web sites did not contain appropriate contents. Both non‐academic and academic contents expected to be found in university web sites were not available and, hence, made the expected inter‐university web links, electronic social networking and cooperation non‐existent. Consequently, only commercially‐based web sites had web link with the sampled web sites. The findings show that the required structure needed to support web collaboration among Nigerian universities has not been developed. Hence, further research to understand the existing structure required for electronic collaboration among Nigerian universities is needed.

Since the study was limited to only those university web sites that had 500 or more web pages, this meant that universities with fewer than 500 web pages, which nevertheless may have traces of social network and cooperation in their link structures, were automatically excluded.

The research provides information on the readiness of Nigerian universities to adopt web site technology for collaboration and solving the problem of resource sharing that they currently face. It has also laid the foundation for understanding Nigerian universities' web site use in relationship with three social capital dimensions: structural, contents, and relational.

The research provides web analysis information on Nigerian universities. Past experience has shown that research available on web analysis and characteristics of Nigerian universities is very limited and that none has been carried out on their web site use for e‐collaboration.

Research has highlighted the cognitive nature of the business model intended as a cognitive representation describing a business’ value creation and value capture activities. Although the content of the business model has been extensively investigated from this perspective, less attention has been paid to the business model’s causal structure – that is the pattern of cause-effect relations that, in top managers’ or entrepreneurs’ understandings, link value creation and value capture activities. Building on the strategic cognition literature, this paper argues that conceptualizing and analysing business models as cognitive maps can shed light on four important properties of a business model’s causal structure: the levels of complexity, focus and clustering that characterize the causal structure and the mechanisms underlying the causal links featured in that structure. I use examples of business models drawn from the literature as illustrations to describe these four properties. Finally, I discuss the value of a cognitive mapping approach for augmenting extant theories and practices of business model design.

The problem of the analytical modeling of macromolecular systems with branching is solved by the statistical polymer, which is based on consideration of averaged structures. All interactions are described in terms of statistical polymers. Cross‐linking is considered as a result of interactions inside statistical polymers. It is concluded that cross‐linking may result in the formation of infinitely hard structures and gelling. Thermodynamic functions of statistical polymers are derived and employed for simulation of the evolution of a non‐equilibrium polymeric system. Equations for the evaluation of various parameters of polymeric systems with branching are derived. Theoretical results are used for the preparation of new materials (having a branched, cross‐linked structure) with forecasted properties.

The Web's link structure (termed the Web Graph) is a richly connected set of Web pages. Current applications use this graph for indexing and information retrieval purposes. In contrast the relationship between Web Graph and application is reversed by letting the structure of the Web Graph influence the behaviour of an application. Presents a novel Web crawling agent, AlienBot, the output of which is orthogonally coupled to the enemy generation strategy of a computer game. The Web Graph guides AlienBot, causing it to generate a stochastic process. Shows the effectiveness of such unorthodox coupling to both the playability of the game and the heuristics of the Web crawler. In addition, presents the results of the sample of Web pages collected by the crawling process. In particular, shows: how AlienBot was able to identify the power law inherent in the link structure of the Web; that 61.74 per cent of Web pages use some form of scripting technology; that the size of the Web can be estimated at just over 5.2 billion pages; and that less than 7 per cent of Web pages fully comply with some variant of (X)HTML.

Many of today's organizations already have a strong integration of groupware systems within their IT‐infrastructure. The shared databases of these groupware systems form organizational memories, which comprise the complete knowledge of an organization collected over the time of its existence. One key problem is how to find relevant knowledge or information in continuously growing and distributed organizational memories. In many cases, the basic functionalities and mechanisms of groupware systems are not sufficient to support users in finding required knowledge or information. Topic maps provide strong paradigms and concepts for the semantic structuring of link networks and therefore, they are a considerable solution for organizing and navigating large and, continuously growing organizational memories. The K‐Discovery project suggests applying topic maps to groupware systems to address the mentioned challenges. Thus, the K‐Discovery project introduces a conceptual framework, an architecture, and an implementation approach to create knowledge structures by generating topic maps from organizational memories and offers navigation tools to exploit the created structures.