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The purpose of this paper is to examine the marketing developments since 1992 at the interface of information and communication technology (ICT) from a marketing channel and consumer perspective.

The research method used was a review of contemporary literature in the field of ICT with particular emphasis on the internet in relation to web‐based purchasing behaviour. This paper examines the usage of the medium as an aide to shopping and selling since its inception and suggests future directions and areas for further investigation.

The findings chronicle the evolution of the internet from a mere tool to enable web‐based shopping to an entity that is able to think; and with the possibility of being able to express or channel emotions and social interaction among users.

This research, whilst purporting to be a conceptual theory building paper, based on thorough literature review, would by no means pretend to be comprehensive and aims to engender further scholarly discussion and empirical testing

In what ever way the web‐based entrepreneur and small to medium‐sized enterprise view the internet, it is not a business‐facilitator to be ignored; and those that do not treat it with the urgency and seriousness that it deserves, do so at their peril.

The paper suggests a novel way of viewing what we have come to take for granted. It is hoped that the discussions will be of value to academics and practitioners alike.

Many REpresentational State Transfer (RESTful) Web services suffered from anti-patterns problem, which may diminish the sustainability of the services. The anti-patterns problem could happen in the code of the programme or the uniform resource identifiers (URIs) of RESTful Web services. This study aims to address the problem by proposing a technique and an algorithm for detecting anti-patterns in RESTful Web services. Specifically, the technique is designed based on URIs parsing process.

The study was conducted following the design science research process, which has six activities, namely, identifying problems, identifying solutions, design the solutions, demonstrate the solution, evaluation and communicate the solution. The proposed technique was embedded in an algorithm and evaluated in four phases covering the process of extracting the URIs, implementing the anti-pattern detection algorithm, detecting the anti-patterns and validating the results.

The results of the study suggested an acceptable level of accuracy for the anti-patterns detection with 82.30% of precision, 87.86% of recall and 84.93% of F-measure.

The technique and the algorithm can be used by developers of RESTful Web services to detect possible anti-pattern occurrences in the service-based systems.

The technique is personalised to detect amorphous URI and ambiguous name anti-patterns in which it scans the Web service URIs using specified rules and compares them with pre-determined syntax and corpus.

The purpose of this paper is to relate how Shanghai Jiao Tong University Library integrates its resources and services, the functions realised and technologies adopted in order to meet user's information needs in a simple, convenient and personalised way. As information resources become more web‐based, disparate and distributed, libraries are facing the challenge of how to provide information efficiently to their users. A promising approach is to integrate resources and deliver services via a portal.

This paper analyses existing portal features, needs and functions, and carries out the approach to meet portal requirements through resource integration and service integration supported by MetaLib, SFX and Web 2.0 technologies.

Portal requirements can be met by resource integration and service integration. Methods to achieve cross searching, ways to enhance resource linking, and integration of library, subject and personalisation services are analysed and concluded. The service framework is depicted in the end.

Since the analysis is not based on an exhaustive list of portals and as technologies are always developing rapidly, the methods and functions to achieve information integration and provision presented in this paper perhaps are not complete and may need to be adjusted and amended. Work is also needed urgently to develop and establish related standards and protocols for service collaboration.

This paper should be helpful for libraries that plan to provide services to their users via information portals, or to develop or evaluate portal systems or products.

This paper analyses and concludes methods and functions to meet portal requirements through resource integration and service integration supported by MetaLib, SFX and Web 2.0 technologies. It discusses the service collaboration and depicts the service framework.

Some specialized consultancies have been making the case of an “API economy”. This study aims to investigate the issue, marshalling data on the economic dimension, to better understand the environments of APIs. It offers an overview of the functions and definition of application programming interfaces (APIs) in the backdrop of the history of services computing. The paper attempt assessing the economic value (size of the market) of APIs and reviews some of the available metrics. The paper also takes a look some issues and challenges ahead for the deployment of all kind of APIs.

The paper is based on desk research and a scientific and grey literature review. However, it relies mostly on specialized consultancies although from a critical viewpoint. The paper provides an historical account of the notions of APIs and API economy.

The paper questions the idea of an “API economy” that still stands on the “hype” side and is not clearly substantiated. It reveals that the number of firms with mature API programs remains small and that there is an uneven development across industries (traditional firms are less active than digital natives) and countries (Silicon Valley is leading). It highlights that the domination of IT companies (leaders and pioneers of APIs) raises issue of competition and at some point, may prevent rather than foster innovation.

There is no robust data about the size of the API market nor about its value. Sources are highly heterogeneous and delimitations not always precise. The standard metrics or indicators are hard to find. Further research would be needed to better document this area.

The paper reviews some of the expected benefits of the use of APIs as enablers of private or public ecosystems.

The paper delineates some of the economic benefits of the public APIs based on open data. It shows some positive examples of public APIs in the EU.

There is hardly any mention of the API economy in research literature. Most of the academic literature still stems from engineering department or business-management departments, not department of economics. Consultants would usually focus on the potential of business growth, on how to design an effective API strategy but not on the very economic dimension. The paper attempts providing a synthesis of the available data.

Modern Enterprise Web Application development can exploit third-party software components, both internal and external to the enterprise, that provide access to huge and valuable data sets, tested by millions of users and often available as Web application programming interfaces (APIs). In this context, the developers have to select the right data services and might rely, to this purpose, on advanced techniques, based on functional and non-functional data service descriptive features. This paper focuses on this selection task where data service selection may be difficult because the developer has no control on services, and source reputation could be only partially known.

The proposed framework and methodology are apt to provide advanced search and ranking techniques by considering: lightweight data service descriptions, in terms of (semantic) tags and technical aspects; previously developed aggregations of data services, to use in the selection process of a service the past experiences with the services when used in similar applications; social relationships between developers (social network) and their credibility evaluations. This paper also discusses some experimental results regarding the plan to expand other experiments to check how developers feel using the approach.

In this paper, a data service selection framework that extends and specializes an existing one for Web APIs selection is presented. The revised multi-layered model for data services is discussed and proper metrics relying on it, meant for supporting the selection of data services in a context of Web application design, are introduced. Model and metrics take into account the network of social relationships between developers, to exploit them for estimating the importance that a developer assigns to other developers’ experience.

This research, with respect to the state of the art, focuses attention on developers’ social networks in an enterprise context, integrating the developers’ credibility assessment and implementing the social network-based data service selection on top of a rich framework based on a multi-perspective model for data services.

Research in the area of technology‐enhanced learning (TEL) throughout the last decade has largely focused on sharing and reusing educational resources and data. This effort has led to a fragmented landscape of competing metadata schemas, or interface mechanisms. More recently, semantic technologies were taken into account to improve interoperability. The linked data approach has emerged as the de facto standard for sharing data on the web. To this end, it is obvious that the application of linked data principles offers a large potential to solve interoperability issues in the field of TEL. This paper aims to address this issue.

In this paper, approaches are surveyed that are aimed towards a vision of linked education, i.e. education which exploits educational web data. It particularly considers the exploitation of the wealth of already existing TEL data on the web by allowing its exposure as linked data and by taking into account automated enrichment and interlinking techniques to provide rich and well‐interlinked data for the educational domain.

So far web‐scale integration of educational resources is not facilitated, mainly due to the lack of take‐up of shared principles, datasets and schemas. However, linked data principles increasingly are recognized by the TEL community. The paper provides a structured assessment and classification of existing challenges and approaches, serving as potential guideline for researchers and practitioners in the field.

Being one of the first comprehensive surveys on the topic of linked data for education, the paper has the potential to become a widely recognized reference publication in the area.

The purpose of this paper is to revisit a decade after its conception the Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural style and analyzes its relevance to address current challenges from the Library and Information Science (LIS) discipline.

Conceptual aspects of REST are reviewed and a generic architecture to support REST is presented. The relevance of the architecture is demonstrated with the help of a case study based on the collection registration database of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.

The authors argue that the “resources and representations” model of REST is a sustainable way for the management of web resources in a context of constant technological evolutions.

When making information resources available on the web, a resource-oriented publishing model can avoid the costs associated with the creation of multiple interfaces.

This paper re-examines the conceptual merits of REST and translates the architecture into actionable recommendations for institutions that publish resources.

This paper aims to propose a conceptual model for improving the organization of user needs information in the big data environment.

A conceptual model of the organization of user needs information based on Linked Data techniques is constructed. This model has three layers: the Data Layer, the Semantic Layer and the Application Layer.

Requirements for organizing user needs information in the big data environment are identified as follows: improving the intelligence level, establishing standards and guidelines for the description of user needs information, enabling the interconnection of user needs information and considering individual privacy in the organization and analysis of user needs.

This Web of Needs model could be used to improve knowledge services by matching user needs information with increasing semantic knowledge resources more effectively and efficiently in the big data environment.

This study proposes a conceptual model, the Web of Needs model, to organize and interconnect user needs. Compared with existing methods, the Web of Needs model satisfies the requirements for the organization of user needs information in the big data environment with regard to four aspects: providing the basis and conditions for intelligent processing of user needs information, using RDF as a description norm, enabling the interconnection of user needs information and setting various protocols to protect user privacy.