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The last decade has seen a growing interest in virtual communities (VCs) as a way of transferring and generating knowledge within organisations (Michaelides et al., 2010). The MySpace phenomenon and the increased use of VCs by large international organisations such as IBM and Procter and Gamble (P&G) confirms the importance of VCs in today's society and the global economy. The holistic approach of using modern Internet tools and technologies with social networks presents both opportunities and challenges in the modern era (Tickle et al., 2007). A VC can be defined as a community of people with a common interest but not necessarily a common geographic location (Sands, 2003). In their most basic form, VCs are websites that allow their users to interact with each other using tools such as discussion forums, 'Blog Spaces', real-time chat and trading areas. VCs allow companies to build stronger, more cost-effective connections between themselves, their partners and their customers (Roberts, 2006). If planned and executed correctly, VCs can benefit businesses by improving resource allocation, customer service and revenues, as well as lowering operating costs. Furthermore, VCs can act as bridges between companies and their customers by fostering product awareness, providing forums for questions and concerns and serving as conduits for feedback to improve future company products. It is therefore imperative that companies embrace business-to-business (B2B) VCs in order for them to remain competitive. Despite the benefits there are numerous challenges that stand to impede the success of each VC; the landscape is littered with VC projects that have failed to meet their expectations due to poor decision making at the development and subsequent deployment stages (Roberts, 2006). This research uses four qualitative case studies to create a holistic Framework with the aim of aiding practitioners wishing to develop and deploy their own B2B VCs. The Framework highlights the various decisions that must be made during the lifecycle of a VC before emphasising each decision's respective consequences. Contrary to common belief, this research has found that the technological aspect of a VC's development and deployment is not the most important factor - it is, in fact, the establishment of a community culture that dictates the success of a B2B VC.

This study explores information management undergraduates' and their teachers' perceptions of being Internet literate, of Internet literacy and their Internet-related practices, with the aim of identifying implications for information departments' pedagogy and curriculum. In particular, it explores the extent to which popular digital native narratives surrounding students' use of the Internet, coincide with the outcomes of this study. Following a constructivist qualitative methodology, focus groups and interviews were conducted with a cohort of 24 undergraduates at the beginning and end of their Information Management studies. Interviews were also conducted with the 17 academics who taught these undergraduates. The information collected was analysed using techniques developed from Naturalistic Inquiry and Constructivist Grounded Theory. This enabled the reconstruction of the multiple realities that exist within the school in relation to the study's aims. Academics perceived that being Internet literate involved the development of a set of competencies, capabilities and qualities that spanned the entire range of Bloom's cognitive and affective taxonomy. They were critical of students' academic-related Internet skills, particularly to find authoritative sources, but aligned themselves with the digital native rhetoric when talking about students' non-academic Internet use. This contrasted with undergraduates, who had an information searching centric perceptions of being Internet literate, both at the beginning and end of their studies, and were highly confident in the areas they associated with being Internet literate, including being able to find Internet sources. Furthermore, students felt they had 'picked-up' their Internet-related skills, as opposed to have been taught them. This study concludes that undergraduates' Internet literacies, coupled with their perception of their own Internet-related abilities and how they became Internet literate, are potentially at odds with academics' understandings of undergraduates' Internet literacies and their role in facilitating students' Internet literacies. This study suggests that unless this divide is bridged, the effective development of undergraduates' Internet literacies within many information schools and departments may be hindered.

This research is to develop a novel collaborative working environment (CWE) for manufacturing and design using advanced Web/Internet technologies such as Web Service, Grid Service and other related software tools/packages. To achieve the above, the following research modules are developed by the author: A service oriented framework for computer aid design, which acts as an online collaboration system, has been developed with the utilisation of the latest technology, Web Service. The concept of Service-Oriented Architecture has been implemented in the framework. Users from anywhere in the world can join the design process from their PCs, no matter what operation system they are using. The service-oriented system has the capability of going through firewalls and can afford multi-users due to the characteristics of Web service. Also the loose-coupling structure makes the system very easy to be updated. Another module for the CWE is to solve the software sharing problem when the platform is used among several geographically dispersed users or organisations. A software package bank system has been developed, which utilised the ideology of service oriented approach and successfully solved traditional problems in this field. Based on the outcomes mentioned above, the research finally developed a more powerful infrastructure using Grid service, which is a further development of Grid computing and Web service. The Grid service is considered to be the most important future solvent for Internet. Since it is based on Web service, the new Grid-enabled system would integrate all the aforementioned Web service systems, which enable the CWE to be a high-performance, powerful, flexible and robust environment for collaboration. As a case study, a Grid service based system utilising the CWE for inventory management has been developed, which proves the feasibility of the novel approaches developed by this research.

As Web services are being increasingly adopted as the distributed computing technology of choice to securely publish application services beyond the firewall, the importance of composing them to create new, value-added service, is increasing. Thus far, the most successful practical approach to Web services composition, largely endorsed by the industry falls under the static composition category where the service selection and flow management are done a priori and manually. The second approach to web-services composition aspires to achieve more dynamic composition by semantically describing the process model of Web services and thus making it comprehensible to reasoning engines or software agents. The practical implementation of the dynamic composition approach is still in its infancy and many complex problems need to be resolved before it can be adopted outside the research communities. The investigation of automatic discovery and composition of Web services in this thesis resulted in the development of the eXtended Semantic Case Based Reasoner (XSCBR), which utilizes semantic web and AI methodology of Case Based Reasoning (CBR). Our framework uses OWL semantic descriptions extensively for implementing both the matchmaking profiles of the Web services and the components of the CBR engine. In this research, we have introduced the concept of runtime behaviour of services and consideration of that in Web services selection. The runtime behaviour of a service is a result of service execution and how the service will behave under different circumstances, which is difficult to presume prior to service execution. Moreover, we demonstrate that the accuracy of automatic matchmaking of Web services can be further improved by taking into account the adequacy of past matchmaking experiences for the requested task. Our XSCBR framework allows annotating such runtime experiences in terms of storing execution values of non-functional Web services parameters such as availability and response time into a case library. The XSCBR algorithm for matchmaking and discovery considers such stored Web services execution experiences to determine the adequacy of services for a particular task. We further extended our fundamental discovery and matchmaking algorithm to cater for web services composition. An intensive knowledge-based substitution approach was proposed to adapt the candidate service experiences to the requested solution before suggesting more complex and computationally taxing AI-based planning-based transformations. The inconsistency problem that occurs while adapting existing service composition solutions is addressed with a novel methodology based on Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP). From the outset, we adopted a pragmatic approach that focused on delivering an automated Web services discovery and composition solution with the minimum possible involvement of all composition participants: the service provider, the requestor and the service composer. The qualitative evaluation of the framework and the composition tools, together with the performance study of the XSCBR framework has verified that we were successful in achieving our goal.

This thesis studies the application of fractal geometry to the application of covert communications systems. This involves the process of hiding information in background noise; the information being encrypted or otherwise. Models and methods are considered with regard to two communications systems: (i) wireless communications; (ii) internet communications. In practice, of course, communication through the Internet cannot be disassociated from wireless communications as Internet traffic is 'piped' through a network that can include wireless communications (e.g. satellite telecommunications). However, in terms of developing models and methods for covert communications in general, points (i) and (ii) above require different approaches and access to different technologies. With regard to (i) above, we develop two methods based on fractal modulation and multi-fractal modulation. With regard to (ii), we implement a practical method and associated software for covert transmission of file attachments based on an analysis of Internet traffic noise. In both cases, however, two fractal models are considered; the first is the standard Random Scaling Fractal model and the second is a generalisation of this model that incorporates a greater range of spectral properties than the first-a Generalised Random Scaling Fractal Model.

Instead of viewing 'flaming' in computer-mediated communication (CMC) as an objective feature of CMC messages, this study adopts an innovative communication analysis approach and theorises it as an interactional phenomenon emerging between luman actors influenced by the social situations created in CMC and the roles and relationships the medium's attributes facilitate.