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Web applications are subject to continuous changes and rapid evolution triggered by increasing competition, especially in commercial domains such as electronic commerce. Unfortunately, usually they are implemented without producing any useful documentation for subsequent maintenance and evolution. Thereof, the maintenance of such systems becomes a challenging problem as the complexity of the web application grows. Reverse engineering has been heralded as one of the most promising technologies to support effective web application maintenance. This paper aims to present a reverse engineering approach that helps understanding existing undocumented web applications to be maintained or evolved.

The proposed approach provides reverse engineering rules to generate a conceptual schema from a given domain ontology by using a set of transformation rules. The reverse engineering process consists of four phases: extracting useful information; identifying a set of ontological constructs representing the concepts of interest; enriching the identified set by additional constructs; and finally deriving a conceptual schema.

The advantage of using ontology for conceptual data modeling is the reusability of domain knowledge. As a result, the conceptual data model will be made faster, easier and with fewer errors than creating it in usual way. Designers can use the extracted conceptual schema to gain a better understanding of web applications and to assist in their maintenance.

The strong point of this approach is that it relies on a very rich semantic reference that is domain ontology. However, it is not possible to make a straightforward transformation of all elements from a domain ontology into a conceptual data model because ontology is semantically richer than data conceptual models.

This study examines the conceptual domain of international marketing following substantial growth in its development. With the objective to investigate recent patterns and development in the literature this study evaluates 1,816 research articles on international marketing published between 1990 and 2012. The classification of conceptual domain has yielded 57 configurational contents under seven prime research streams. Simple meta-analysis on international marketing literature created a clear depiction of attention of contributors toward research streams and the number of contributors, and worthy sources of literature. Several directions for advancement of knowledge in international marketing, identified fields, and their implications for future research are discussed.

Companies are increasingly leveraging digital technologies toward innovation strategies that deliver novel features to customers sequentially through successive new product generations (i.e., successive innovation). Extant literature examining successive innovation is both limited and fragmented across marketing and management literatures. Our goal is to synthesize literature on concepts related to successive innovation (such as versioning and upgrades) to identify the core dimensions of successive innovation and provide a cohesive framework to guide future research in this domain.

Given the equivocality in understanding the conceptual domain of successive innovation, we review and synthesize literature across three disciplinary domains: marketing, management, and information and decision sciences. Based on the emerging patterns from the literature review, we develop a conceptual framework of successive innovation with the aim of moving the discussion toward greater theoretical clarity.

Based on the literature review and synthesis, we identify three core-dimensions that define successive innovation and compare these across digital and physical product realms: coexistence, embeddedness, and adoption controllability.

Our proposed conceptual dimensions of successive innovation, and discussion of differences across physical and digital product domains, offer important directions for future research and a common vocabulary.

As physical and digital successive innovations can differ in coexistence, embeddedness, and adoption controllability, firms need to consider relevant barriers to adoption of successive product generations and select appropriate strategies to promote and communicate successive innovation. Our proposed successive innovation conceptual dimensions help managers comprehend the complexity of arranging such innovation in business and consumer segments.

Our contribution to the emerging literature on successive innovation is threefold. First, by conducting a comprehensive literature review, we integrate insights from different fields of inquiry (i.e., marketing, management, and information and decision sciences). Second, based on the synthesis of the literature, we offer a conceptual framework of successive innovation, which aims to move the discussion toward greater theoretical clarity. Third, based on our review and conceptual framework, we discuss a set of future research directions to guide academic research efforts.

This study was conducted with the aim of examining important and frequently used managerial competencies for private club managers. Sandwith's five‐competency domain model was applied to private club managers who were members of the Club Managers Association of America (CMAA).

A total of 800 private club managers from throughout the USA were invited to participate in this study. Managers were randomly selected from the Club Managers Association of America (CMAA) membership list.

This study investigated managerial competencies for private club managers. A total of 28 competencies were classified as essential competencies, 120 were classified as considerably important competencies, and three were classified as moderately important competencies for private club managers. These were classified into five domains: the conceptual/creative domain, the leadership domain, the administrative domain, the interpersonal domain, and the technical domain. Leadership and interpersonal competencies were rated as the most important and the most frequently used managerial competencies. These results are consistent with previous research in other segments of the hospitality industry.

This study provides club managers with information on which competencies are important and frequently used to manage private clubs. By measuring the importance of individual competencies, managers can show how critical they are within a particular profession. It is also important to see how often competencies are used in a particular job. The results of this study should help managers and educators identify a list of skills that should be developed in future private club managers through training programs and curriculum offerings.

Previous studies on management competencies in the private club profession have only addressed managers' administrative and technical competencies. This is the only known study of its kind to examine Sandwith's conceptual‐creative, interpersonal and leadership competency domains for private club managers.

The purpose of this paper is to review the use of adaptive systems in education. It is intended to be a useful introduction for the non-specialist reader.

A distinction is made between intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) and adaptive hypermedia systems (AHSs). The two kinds of system are defined, compared and contrasted. Examples of the implementation of the two kinds of system are included.

Similarities and differences between the two kinds of system are highlighted. A conceptual unification is proposed based on the architecture of Course Assembly System and Tutorial Environment, a seminal prototype learning environment developed by Pask and Scott in the 1970s as an application of Pask’s conversation theory.

The architecture shows how the key aspects of ITSs and AHSs can be combined to complement each other. It is intended to be an original contribution that is of particular interest for the specialist reader.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the sources and categories of well-being from the transformative service research (TSR) domain. The paper also aims to offer a unified framework of sources and categories of well-being and several future research agenda.

A systematic literature review method is applied to address the study aims. A three-phase approach has been applied, which produced a total of 70 peer-reviewed empirical studies for the review.

The analysis has identified five major sources and their underlying sub-sources of well-being. The major sources are organization-, individual-, collective-, service system-, and situation-driven sources. The findings further identified two major categories or well-being showing the capacity and functioning, and subjective appraisals of life conditions. The identified sources and categories of well-being develop a unified framework showing a simplistic path or relations between the sources and the categories.

The paper offers several research agenda explaining what source-related issues can be addressed for enhancing well-being for various entities. It also adds a proposed schema and research questions for examining the possible relations and influences between the sources of well-being and social well-being of individuals.

Practitioners can get important insights about the matters over which they have little or no control such as the activities, motives and processes that take place in individuals' and collectives' spheres and mechanisms of supports in social networks.

The paper is the first to offer a systematic review on the empirical studies of the TSR domain identifying a comprehensive list of sources and categories of well-being and a resulting unified framework and research agenda.

One major aspect of T.D. Wilson’s research has been his insistence on situating the investigation of information behaviour within the context of its occurrence Ö within the everyday world of work. The significance of this approach is reviewed in light of the notion of embodied cognition that characterises the evolving theoretical episteme in cognitive science research. Embodied cognition employs complex external props such as stigmergic structures and cognitive scaffoldings to reduce the cognitive burden on the individual and to augment human problem‐solving activities. The cognitive function of the classification scheme is described as exemplifying both stigmergic structures and cognitive scaffoldings. Two different but complementary approaches to the investigation of situated cognition are presented: cognition‐as‐scaffolding and cognition‐as‐infrastructure. Classification‐as‐scaffolding views the classification scheme as a knowledge storage device supporting and promoting cognitive economy. Classification‐as‐infrastructure views the classification system as a social convention that, when integrated with technological structures and organisational practices, supports knowledge management work. Both approaches are shown to build upon and extend Wilson’s contention that research is most productive when it attends to the social and organisational contexts of cognitive activity by focusing on the everyday world of work.

Stafford Beer developed managerial cybernetics, but there were many facets of his work. Most of his work concerned epistemology, and little concerned ontology. Not all of the aspects or implications of his work has been fully recognised, and an attempt shall be made to explore one of these. In particular, this paper explores his paradigm by considering some of the epistemologically and ontological angles. Some of the implications for Beer's work will also be shown to have led to the creation of a virtual paradigm capable of exploring his achievements “externally”, after Gödel.

The purpose of this article is to analyze the decline of two central metaphors of macroeconomics, economics and markets, and suggests ways in which metaphoric vigor can be initiated to promote economic reflection, inter-disciplinary collaboration, and more productive engagement with the broader society. Economics and markets can be described as dead metaphors which have ceased to provide any metaphoric advantage or potential but which nevertheless remain central to economic discourse. At a time when economics is coming under societal scrutiny and being asked to explain its assumptions, predictive ability and social impact, the perceived distance and sterility of economic language presents a significant problem.

The central approach is an analysis of the ways in which metaphor come into being, provide regenerative insights and communicate open and creative discourse. Metaphor theory is introduced, as are theoretical considerations on the decline of conceptual metaphor through over familiarization.

Metaphor in economics is underexplored and this article suggests that a more engaged and creative approach will provide benefit within the discipline and will be necessary to sustain the ongoing discourse with those outside the field.

This article provides new insight into the problems associated with the failure to recognize and to resuscitate metaphor in macroeconomics. It provides original perspectives on the problem, and presents novel suggestions for reducing the communication difficulties that metaphor failure has produced, particularly in communicating economic perspectives with the broader society.

The multidimensionality of the concept of disability makes the development of questions to measure the concept very complicated. In addition, the purposes of data collection can require a variety of different dimensions of the concept of disability to meet the variety of data uses. This paper proposes a data matrix for use in focusing the methodologist on the issues related to the multidimensionality of the concept and the variety of data needs when planning surveys. Discussions of the three components of the matrix, purpose, conceptual domains and question characteristics, provides the reader with an understanding of the elements of this tool. Multiple tables provide examples of the possible uses of the matrix.