The Dynamics of the Electronic Market: An Evolutionary Game Approach

The capabilities afforded by network technologies have facilitated the growth of electronic commerce. However, online frauds pose serious challenges to the further adoption of the electronic market. In order to promote trust and reduce transaction risks, various trusted third parties have emerged and new models have been proposed. Will people use the trusted third parties while conducting online transactions? How will the electronic market evolve? This research attempts to identify the different equilibria of the electronic market using an evolutionary game theoretic approach and to explore the best strategy to do transactions in the electronic market. Also, the work provides a theoretical justification to the emergence and necessity of trusted third parties for electronic transactions.     

Widget Identification: A High-Level Approach to Accessibility

The Web 2.0 sees once static pages evolve into hybrid applications, and content that was previously simple, now becoming increasingly complicated due to the many updating components located throughout the page. While beneficial for some users, these components (widgets) are often complex and will lead to confusion and frustration for others, notably those for whom accessibility is already an issue. While users and developers often perceive widgets as complete components (a Slideshow, or an Auto Suggest List), they are in-fact heterogeneous collections of code, and are therefore hard to computationally identify. Identification is critical if we wish to reverse engineer inaccessible widgets or ‘inject’ missing ‘WAI-ARIA’ into ‘RIAs’. In this case, we introduce a technique that analyses the code associated with a Web page to identify widgets using combinations of code constructs which enable uniquely identification. We go on to technically evaluate our approach with the most difficult widgets to distinguish between—Slideshows and Carousels—and then describe two prototype applications for visually impaired and older users by means of example.     

An empirical investigation into the difficulties experienced by visually impaired Internet users

In this paper, an empirical based study is described which has been conducted to gain a deeper understanding of the challenges faced by the visually impaired community when accessing the Web. The study, involving 30 blind and partially sighted computer users, has identified navigation strategies, perceptions of page layout and graphics using assistive devices such as screen readers. Analysis of the data has revealed that current assistive technologies impose navigational constraints and provide limited information on web page layout. Conveying additional spatial information could enhance the exploration process for visually impaired Internet users. It could also assist the process of collaboration between blind and sighted users when performing web-based tasks. The findings from the survey have informed the development of a non-visual interface, which uses the benefits of multimodal technologies to present spatial and navigational cues to the user.     

Growing online-to-offline platform businesses: How Vytal became the world-leading provider of smart reusable food packaging

Online platform businesses can grow massively and rapidly. But what if a company's business model features both an online platform application and a physical product, as is the case in logistics (e.g. container distribution), consumer retail (e.g. food delivery), or mobility (e.g. booking of shared rental vehicles)? Online-to-offline platform businesses must synchronise online platform growth with offline product transaction growth because online platforms may attract users, but value generation and capture occur through offline product transactions. If one outpaces the other, either demand cannot be satisfied, or costs increase disproportionally. How do online-to-offline platform businesses navigate this dilemma? We report on the exemplary case of Vytal, an innovative startup that has managed to become the world-largest provider of smart reusable packaging solutions in the food retail sector. Vytal couples the distribution of offline food containers with an online transaction platform application that connects restaurants, canteens, and supermarkets with consumers. We trace how Vytal strategically organised and orchestrated their growth online and offline. Based on our analysis, we offer a framework containing practical lessons for how companies can grow online-to-offline platform business models and navigate the trade-offs between the online and offline components of such business models.     

盲人数字图书馆设计策略的研究

从页面设计和功能设计两个模块来阐述,提出了盲人数字图书馆的设计策略,旨在通过提高盲人数字图书馆的易访问性来使盲人和视障用户便利地访问网站,获取自己所需要的信息。     

盲人数字图书馆设计策略的研究

从页面设计和功能设计两个模块来阐述,提出了盲人数字图书馆的设计策略,旨在通过提高盲人数字图书馆的易访问性来使盲人和视障用户便利地访问网站,获取自己所需要的信息。     

Spring Web Flow在自适应在线考试引擎中的应用

自适应在线考试引擎中涉及到与用户进行复杂的会话式导航功能，使用MVC框架开发时会导致业务逻辑和页面流程处理之间的耦合。通过Spring Web Flow提供的页面流程XML定义语法，可以解除应用逻辑和页面之间的耦合，提高程序的灵活性、可扩展性和可维护性。     

Tailored presentation of dynamic web content for audio browsers

Understanding the content of a Web page and navigating within and between pages are crucial tasks for any Web user. To those who are accessing pages through non-visual means, such as screen readers, the challenges offered by these tasks are not easily overcome, even when pages are unchanging documents. The advent of ‘Web 2.0’ and Web applications, however, means that documents often are not static, but update, either automatically or due to user interaction. This development poses a difficult question for screen reader designers: how should users be notified of page changes? In this article we introduce rules for presenting such updates, derived from studies of how sighted users interact with them. An implementation of the rules has been evaluated, showing that users who were blind or visually impaired found updates easier to deal with than the relatively quiet way in which current screen readers often present them.     

Why e-business will be good for business

E-business — B2B transactions on-line — is going to be big business. But, at present, e-business is far from secure. Fraudulent identities, transaction interceptions and hacked Web sites have companies justifiably worried about conducting business on-line. PKI systems, with certificates of identity carried on smart cards, look as if they will provide the answer.     

How people use presentation to search for a link: expanding the understanding of accessibility on the Web

It is well known that many Web pages are difficult to use for visually disabled people. Without access to a rich visual display, the intended structure and organisation of the page is obscured. To fully understand what is missing from the experience of visually disabled users, it is pertinent to ask how the presentation of Web pages on a standard display makes them easier for sighted people to use. This paper reports on an exploratory eye tracking study that addresses this issue by investigating how sighted readers use the presentation of the BBC News Web page to search for a link. The standard page presentation is compared with a “text-only” version, demonstrating both qualitatively and quantitatively that the removal of the intended presentation alters “reading” behaviours. The demonstration that the presentation of information assists task completion suggests that it should be re-introduced to non-visual presentations if the Web is to become more accessible. The conducted study also explored the extent to which algorithms that generate maps of what is perceptually salient on a page match the gaze data recorded in the eye tracking study. The correspondence between a page’s presentation, knowledge of what is visually salient, and how people use these features to complete a task might offer an opportunity to re-model a Web page to maximise access to its most important parts.

Web使用挖掘中的数据预处理算法研究

数据预处理是Web使用挖掘的一个关键环节,数据预处理的结果直接影响到后续步骤,如事务识别、路径分析、关联规则挖掘和序列模式挖掘的效果。提出了一种精确识别用户和会话的数据预处理算法(USIA),并且用实验证明它是高效的。     

基于C2C的可信信用评价模型

提出一个基于C2C的可信信用评价模型。该模型根据历史交易记录,在综合考虑交易金额、买卖双方信誉度、交易次数、差评次数、未评价交易的基础上,采用动态计算的方式,为交易的成功进行提供可靠的依据。该模型可以有效甄别恶意用户和诚信用户,从而减少信誉诋毁行为,并可减少信誉榨取行为,提高C2C电子交易的安全性。     

Quality in Web Design for Visually Impaired Users

Visually impaired users require web page interfaces that they can interact with. Providing such interfaces is necessary to serve this community, and is required by government regulation. This paper describes the unique web access requirements of visually impaired users. It reviews surveys of the suitability of web sites for the partially sighted and blind. Most web sites do not meet the requirements of the UK and other governments. In addition, serving the visually impaired is a marketing opportunity for organizations, as there is an ever increasing population with potential sight problems.     

JPernLite: extensible transaction services for the WWW

Concurrency control is one of the key problems in design and implementation of collaborative systems such as hypertext/hypermedia systems, CAD/CAM systems, and software development environments. Most existing systems store data in specialized databases with built-in concurrency control policies, usually implemented via locking. It is desirable to construct such collaborative systems on top of the World Wide Web, but most Web servers do not support even conventional transactions, let alone distributed (multi-Website) transactions or flexible concurrency control mechanisms oriented toward team work-such as event notification, shared locks, and fine granularity locks. We present a transaction server that operates independently of Web servers or the collaborative systems, to fill the concurrency control gap. By default, the transaction server enforces the conventional atomic transaction model, where sets of operations are performed in an all-or-nothing fashion and isolated from concurrent users. The server can be tailored dynamically to apply more sophisticated concurrency control policies appropriate for collaboration. The transaction server also supports applications employing information resources other than Web servers, such as legacy databases, CORBA objects, and other hypermedia systems. Our implementation permits a wide range of system architecture styles     

Recipe for e-commerce

The article focuses on Internet economics and examines some of the more controversial and often misunderstood aspects of shopping on the Web, such as transaction security and the much maligned Magic Cookie. Knowing more about the technologies behind commercial Web transactions can help make the Web a less scary place to type in your credit card number. The Web was never designed to be a transaction oriented environment. The basic transport protocol of the Web-HTTP-is a stateless environment; when combined with TCP/IP's packet switched mechanics, it makes for one heck of a wild ride. Not only can you not connect to and maintain an ongoing session within a Web server, but you can't even maintain a continuous and uninterrupted packet stream with that server. HTTP guarantees that every link you click is a completely new and complete transaction with a beginning and an end, and TCP/IP ensures that every packet composing that brief connection is first accounted for and then immediately forgotten. This environment, while advantageous for some applications, is problematic for conducting online commerce. The difficulty imposed by the Web's stateless environment manifests itself in two primary areas: securing the transaction and payment, and tracking the customer's shopping session. A third but slightly less difficult obstacle is recognizing a customer when they return to a site at another time, which from a marketing perspective is very important. We look at each of these problems and how they are being overcome in today's online commerce environment     

A framework for ensuring consistency of Web Services Transactions

For efficiently managing Web Services (WS) transactions which are executed across multiple loosely-coupled autonomous organizations, isolation is commonly relaxed. A Web service operation of a transaction releases locks on its resources once its jobs are completed without waiting for the completions of other operations. However, those early unlocked resources can be seen by other transactions, which can spoil data integrity and cause incorrect outcomes. Existing WS transaction standards do not consider this problem. In this paper, we propose a mechanism to ensure the consistent executions of isolation-relaxing WS transactions. The mechanism effectively detects inconsistent states of transactions with a notion of an end-state dependency and recovers them to consistent states. We also propose a new Web services Transaction Dependency management Protocol (WTDP). WTDP helps organizations manage the WS transactions easily without data inconsistency. WTDP is designed to be compliant with a representative WS transaction standard, the Web Services Transactions specifications, for easy integration into existing WS transaction systems. We prototyped a WTDP-based WS transaction management system to validate our protocol.     

TRDFA:一种用于事务识别的DFA

在Web使用挖掘的预处理中,会话识别结束后需要经过路径补充将那些由于缓存而遗漏的页面补全,而后进行事务识别。构造了一个TRDFA,能从未经路径补充的会话中直接提取事务,并考虑了多窗口方式打开页面的情形。该方法对于只关心最终事务的用户而言,节省了整个预处理的时间,提高了效率。     

A new model for context-aware transactions in mobile services

With the ubiquity of handheld devices (such as smart phones and PDAs) and the availability of a wide range of mobile services (such as mobile banking, road traffic updates, and weather forecast), people can nowadays access information and conduct online transactions virtually anywhere and anytime. In such flexible, dynamic but less reliable environment, transaction management technology is believed to provide service reliability and data consistency. Indeed, in mobile and ubiquitous environments where devices as well as services can seamlessly join and leave the ubiquitous network; transaction management can be very helpful during the recovery of services from failure. Current transaction models and commit protocols do not take into account context information. However, in mobile environments, it is imperative to consider context information in the commit of a transaction—i.e., a transaction can be successfully completed if it meets the required context. In this paper, we propose a new model for context-aware transactions and their performance management in mobile environments. Unlike conventional transactions, context-aware transactions adapt to the required context. By context, we mean the service’s context as well as the users’ context that includes users’ needs and preferences. This paper designs and develops the proposed transaction model and evaluates its performance in terms of time and message complexities as well as transaction’s throughput.     

一种Web服务组合事务框架的设计与实现

Web服务组合已成为跨企业应用集成的主要方法,服务组合需要事务机制来保证其可靠性。由于服务组合自身的特点,传统事务处理方法不适合。首先总结服务组合事务的特点,提出了基于层次的服务组合事务框架,并详细分析了服务组合事务的协调过程。最后给出了服务组合事务协调协议并实现了服务组合事务服务原型系统。     

Phone‐Web: Accessing WWW using a telephone set

In order to provide a ubiquitous, comprehensive and versatile service on the WWW the development of a WWW telephone browsing system named Phone‐Web is proposed. This Phone‐Web browser system would act as an intermediary between the telephone user and Web sites, thereby facilitating access to the WWW from any phone. The Phone‐Web system would filter Web page information and then convert it into speech format. Users of the Phone‐Web system could retrieve and hear information stored on WWW servers by using telephone handsets. For this system to work it requires a new hypertext language “Hyper Phone Markup Language” (HPML) and a dedicated Phone‐Web browser. By using the proposed HPML language, Web page designers can easily specify service information in a set of HPML pages, which would be included in the site they are designing. The Phone‐Web browser would be capable of retrieving and then converting the HPML pages into speech patterns. By connecting to the Phone‐Web browser, telephone users can access any information on any site using the HPML language from any telephone anywhere in the world. However, HPML‐specified pages can also be accessed using existing browsers (e.g., Netscape Navigator, Microsoft Internet Explorer, etc.) This means that both telephone and computer users can now access the same set of Web pages to retrieve the same information. Therefore, instead of maintaining the existing two systems (access via the telephone or computer) service providers can now maintain one system, which would provide a versatile, and comprehensive service for users at all levels of Web‐literacy. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.