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The development of information systems and information management continue to present considerable challenges for many organizations, and more often than not for reason other than technological ones. Politically sensitive issues that are frequently raised by and bound up in such matters are an important cause of difficulties. This thesis proposes that perceptions of ownership of business processes and data by various groups within an organization can be a potent contributing factor in the occurrence of such political troubles. The thesis uses the new concept of information wards to develop a graphical model that links the scope of system development or organizational change and ownership perceptions to the likelihood of political difficulties. It then explores the links to organizational theory. The applicability and usefulness of the model is then argued through its application to a variety of case drawn from the information systems literature as well as case study project that provided the initial stimulus for the model???s development. It is shown that the model is capable of providing a variable explanation of the occurrence or absence of political troubles in the cases investigated. A prototype specialized group support system called Info*Warder based on the model has been built and is described in some detail. The software allows representative of organizational stakeholders to stake claims to business processes and data that are within the scope of systems development or change proposals, with the intention of permitting early detection of differences of opinion and potential conflicts. The thesis describes a research study in which the Info*Warder software was trialled within three Australia State Government departments. These departments were undergoing significant change both in their roles and information systems support arrangements and provided a useful test for the model and software. While the test was an indicative one only, it nevertheless showed that the software and its underlying theoretical model have the potential to assist in clarifying ownership issues related to information management and systems development in organizations, thereby helping to resolve them. Lastly, the thesis assesses how the developed model and software might fit into representative existing techniques and methodologies.

This study investigates the factors affecting the implementation of e-BIS with a focus on the factors facilitating implementation success and obstacles leading to failure. An in-depth review of literature in information systems and e-business implementation was conducted to identify various implementation approaches and possible factors affecting eBIS implementation.

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The huge number of documents available on the Web represents a challenge for the information retrieval (IR) systems. The explosive growth in the number of documents published on the Web has made the web search engines the main means of initiating the interaction with the Internet. There are many good search engines, but users are often not satisfied with the results provided by the search engines. In many cases, the answers returned by the search engines are not relevant to the user information need, forcing the user to manually sift through the long list to locate the desired documents. Often, when using a search engine the user needs to repeatedly refine their query as they do not have enough domain knowledge to formulate the query precisely. Although the average users know what kind of information they want, it becomes difficult for them to translate it to the search engine in an effective way so that the search engine understands the user needs. The specification of such a query is limited by the user's vocabulary and knowledge of the search domain. Even when disjunctions or conjunctions of keywords are chosen as the way of expressing the search goal, as existing search engines do, the user may not know what set of keywords they should use to define the collection of the desired documents precisely. Good query formulation requires that a user can somehow predict which terms appear in documents relevant to the information need. Accurate term prediction requires extensive knowledge about the document collection. Such knowledge may be hard to obtain, especially in large document collections. In the field of information retrieval, it has been recognised that, although users had difficulty expressing exactly the information that they require, they could judge the retrieved documents as relevant or irrelevant based on their information need. This lead to the notion of Relevance feedback: users marking documents as relevant to their needs and presenting this information to the information retrieval system. The system can use this information to retrieve more documents like the relevant ones by a process known as Query expansion. This research explores the use of relevance feedback techniques to automatically discover related words to a query from the contents of the user-identified relevant documents. With these set of words it gives an algorithm to synthesise the user query in the form of a Boolean expression. The basic idea is that, a synthesised query providing a richer representation of the user's query would increase the number of relevant documents retrieved when used as a query to a search engine. The three objectives for the algorithm are to ensure that the synthesised query has good recall, good precision and not least, is of a form and size acceptable to the intended search engine. The query synthesis algorithm starts by imposing a task in the form of a first-cut search query to a search engine. The outcome from the search engine is displayed in terms of a set of documents. Considering that the documents found on the Web being text documents, the user would attribute the documents as Relevant or Irrelevant based on their information needs. From these two sets of documents the algorithm creates a Boolean search query in the following five steps: 1. The Boolean query construction begins with the construction of a CNF (Conjunctive Normal Form) Boolean expression of terms that selects every document in set Relevant and rejects every document in set Irrelevant. However the expressions so constructed are often too large to be acceptable to a search engine. 2. The CNF expression is transformed into equivalent DNF (Disjunctive Normal Form) expression. Redundant minterms are removed from further consideration and the set of non redundant minterms are referred as Mset. 3. A Boolean expression Query is constructed by selecting minterms from Mset.The goal is to select a small set of minterms that selects each document in set Relevant. The constructed query is then written in a form suitable to the search engine. 4. The process stops if the Query is acceptable to the search engine. Boolean expression Query becomes the required synthesised query. Otherwise, the Query needs modification in step 5. 5. Minterms are modified to create a new minterm set Mset and the process repeats again from step3. In this research, Google is used as the prime example of a search engine because of its popularity and cached link features on the Web. To confirm the success of the proposed query synthesis algorithm, a survey was organised with day to day users of a general purpose search engine like Google. To conduct the survey, a list of topics in diverse domains was chosen to collect data from the Web and a set of queries were generated by applying the proposed algorithm on these data sets. The participants were then asked to create queries for these host topics consistent with the information need. No constraint was placed on them regarding the time, number of tries or quality of their query. The target was to compare the quality of the human generated queries with the synthesised queries using evaluation measures known as precision, coverage and their combination called F1 measure. The traditional precision and coverage measurements collected during the survey show that the synthesised queries overwhelmingly perform better than the user queries. F1 measure is employed as the main evaluation metric as it combines both precision and recall into a single metric and favour a balanced performance of the two metrics. It resolves the anomalous situations, where a query with large coverage but low precision may not be considered as satisfactory as one with a modest coverage but high precision. The number of relevant documents among the first 10 and 20 retrieved links is used as a measure of the precision. Due to the difficulties of calculating recall, a new measure called coverage is used. The result shows that the synthesised queries can provide better values of F1 measure than the queries generated from a user's best effort. Higher values in F1 measure indicates the high values of precision and coverage obtained by the synthesised queries. Besides achieving the above goals, the proposed algorithm is able to synthesise queries in a form and size acceptable to the search engine. To verify whether the outcome of the survey is not resulted by chance a statistical procedure known as paired t-test is applied on the data obtained from the survey. The results of this test suggest that the synthesised queries provide better results when compared to human generated queries, which is statistically significant (P-value<0.00001). The data obtained from the user survey has also been used to provide insights into the quality of human queries as function of its syntactical and other characteristics.

This thesis presents a new approach to modelling the security and integrity of data in distributed and ad-hoc networks of processes. An annotated type based analysis is introduced which ensures that no contamination will occur between data considered trustworthy and data that may have been corrupted. A method of performing safe run-time coercion of security properties of data is also presented. This is novel because it enables users to perform run-time coercions of data in a manner that may be statically proven safe. Both plain networks and dynamic (agent-based) networks are considered. These are modelled as systems of first-order and higher-order pi-calculus, respectively. The higher-order system examined introduces a new notion of trustworthiness dependent on the context in which it is typed or executed. This allows programs with malicious intent to be safely executed when it can be demonstrated that no possibility for interaction with other programs, including the host, is possible. A concept of execution context is introduced to perform this analysis. In addition, annotated type systems with and without sub-typing are described, and sub ject reduction is shown to hold for all systems considered. Implementation of the method is demonstrated via type-inference algorithms, and these are shown to be both sound and complete for all systems.

This study investigates the factors affecting the implementation of e-BIS with a focus on the factors facilitating implementation success and obstacles leading to failure. An in-depth review of literature in information systems and e-business implementation was conducted to identify various implementation approaches and possible factors affecting eBIS implementation.

Thesis (M.S.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Industrial and Sysyems Engineering Department, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references.

Diss. Uppsala : Uppsala universitet, 2007.