Academic literature on the topic 'Web-Based Information Systems'

In recent years, the World Wide Web has become a major platform for software applications. Web-based information systems have been involved in many areas of our everyday life, such as education, entertainment, business, manufacturing, communication, etc. As web-based systems are usually distributed, multimedia, interactive and cooperative, and their production processes usually follow ad-hoc approaches, the quality of web-based systems has become a major concern. . Existing quality models and metrics do not fully satisfy the needs of quality management of Web-based systems. This study has applied and adapted software quality engineering methods and principles to address the following issues, a quality modeling method for derivation of quality models of Web-based information systems; and the development, implementation and validation of quality metrics of key quality' attributes of Web-based information systems, which include navigability and timeliness. The quality modeling method proposed in this study has the following strengths. It is more objective and rigorous than existing approaches. The quality analysis can be conducted in the early stage of system life cycle on the design. It is easy to use and can provide insight into the improvement of the design of systems. Results of case studies demonstrated that the quality modeling method is applicable and practical. Practitioners can use the modeling method to develop their own quality models. This study is amongst the first comprehensive attempts to develop quality measurement for Web-based information systems. First, it identified the relationship between website structural complexity and navigability. Quality metrics of navigability were defined, investigated and implemented. Empirical studies were conducted to evaluate the metrics. Second, this study investigated website timeliness and attempted to find direct and indirect measures for the quality attribute. Empirical studies for validating such metrics were also conducted. This study also suggests four areas of future research that may be fruitful.

<p>For now, vastly growing Web-technology has matured enough to become an attractiveplatform for business applications and organizational information systems. Indeed, largeand small organizations are increasing their investment in Web-based Information Systems(IS) resources, such as Electronic Commerce, Intranets and Extranets. As DIWA(1999) explained that Web technology is often presented as a 'revolution' in informationsystem technologies in the business press, which could propel change from static, hierarchicalstructures to more dynamic, flexible and 'knowledge-based' organizationalforms. To the companies, more and more legacy information and database systems arebeing migrated to Web-based environments.</p><p>This research aims to analyse and advise enterprises to be Web-based enterprise withchallenges and opportunities.</p><p>During the research, the author investigated a company that were using the Web-based(applications made available via the World Wide Web) information service. For obtainingreliable conclusions and delivering valuable advises, various research methods wereadopted by the author including qualitative research methodology, analysis, interviews,and literature study. Data was collected through lecture review and in-depth interviews.</p><p>Undoubtedly, there are some troubles existed in migrating, such as technologies for restructureinformation system structure, resource distribution, benefit analysis, planningand management, operation and maintenance etc.</p><p>But still obviously, as the research shows that there are many benefits can be got followsthe implementation of Web-based solution, which includes improving efficiency,modernizing company IT environment, providing better IS/IT systems’ maintenanceand providing more agility and functionality etc.</p>

Business Intelligence is becoming more and more an essential element for a company’s planning, development and consistency. A company usually aims to predict and optimize the outcome of different decisions. In order to do that, it requires a tool that can perform scenario analysis or “what if” – analysis. These analyses can be performed with spreadsheets and today with the tools within business analysis being web-based, the purpose of the project is to combine a web-based spreadsheet with an analysis from a BI server. The BI server provides sample data. Should a combination be possible then a continuing goal would be to connect the BI server with a database and in that way provide the spreadsheet with data to perform “what if” – analysis. The results indicated that a combination between the web-based spreadsheet and the BI server was possible. However, a few alterations of the spreadsheet are still necessary in order for the combination to work as desired. Further developments of the product involve managing to adapt it to smartphones and tablets.

The recent emergence of intelligent agent technology and advances in information gathering have been the important steps forward in efficiently managing and using the vast amount of information now available on the Web to make informed decisions. There are, however, still many problems that need to be overcome in the information gathering research arena to enable the delivery of relevant information required by end users. Good decisions cannot be made without sufficient, timely, and correct information. Traditionally it is said that knowledge is power, however, nowadays sufficient, timely, and correct information is power. So gathering relevant information to meet user information needs is the crucial step for making good decisions. The ideal goal of information gathering is to obtain only the information that users need (no more and no less). However, the volume of information available, diversity formats of information, uncertainties of information, and distributed locations of information (e.g. World Wide Web) hinder the process of gathering the right information to meet the user needs. Specifically, two fundamental issues in regard to efficiency of information gathering are mismatch and overload. The mismatch means some information that meets user needs has not been gathered (or missed out), whereas, the overload means some gathered information is not what users need. Traditional information retrieval has been developed well in the past twenty years. The introduction of the Web has changed people's perceptions of information retrieval. Usually, the task of information retrieval is considered to have the function of leading the user to those documents that are relevant to his/her information needs. The similar function in information retrieval is to filter out the irrelevant documents (or called information filtering). Research into traditional information retrieval has provided many retrieval models and techniques to represent documents and queries. Nowadays, information is becoming highly distributed, and increasingly difficult to gather. On the other hand, people have found a lot of uncertainties that are contained in the user information needs. These motivate the need for research in agent-based information gathering. Agent-based information systems arise at this moment. In these kinds of systems, intelligent agents will get commitments from their users and act on the users behalf to gather the required information. They can easily retrieve the relevant information from highly distributed uncertain environments because of their merits of intelligent, autonomy and distribution. The current research for agent-based information gathering systems is divided into single agent gathering systems, and multi-agent gathering systems. In both research areas, there are still open problems to be solved so that agent-based information gathering systems can retrieve the uncertain information more effectively from the highly distributed environments. The aim of this thesis is to research the theoretical framework for intelligent agents to gather information from the Web. This research integrates the areas of information retrieval and intelligent agents. The specific research areas in this thesis are the development of an information filtering model for single agent systems, and the development of a dynamic belief model for information fusion for multi-agent systems. The research results are also supported by the construction of real information gathering agents (e.g., Job Agent) for the Internet to help users to gather useful information stored in Web sites. In such a framework, information gathering agents have abilities to describe (or learn) the user information needs, and act like users to retrieve, filter, and/or fuse the information. A rough set based information filtering model is developed to address the problem of overload. The new approach allows users to describe their information needs on user concept spaces rather than on document spaces, and it views a user information need as a rough set over the document space. The rough set decision theory is used to classify new documents into three regions: positive region, boundary region, and negative region. Two experiments are presented to verify this model, and it shows that the rough set based model provides an efficient approach to the overload problem. In this research, a dynamic belief model for information fusion in multi-agent environments is also developed. This model has a polynomial time complexity, and it has been proven that the fusion results are belief (mass) functions. By using this model, a collection fusion algorithm for information gathering agents is presented. The difficult problem for this research is the case where collections may be used by more than one agent. This algorithm, however, uses the technique of cooperation between agents, and provides a solution for this difficult problem in distributed information retrieval systems. This thesis presents the solutions to the theoretical problems in agent-based information gathering systems, including information filtering models, agent belief modeling, and collection fusions. It also presents solutions to some of the technical problems in agent-based information systems, such as document classification, the architecture for agent-based information gathering systems, and the decision in multiple agent environments. Such kinds of information gathering agents will gather relevant information from highly distributed uncertain environments.

<p>The Web has been defined as the interface between Web servers and Web clients. Traditionally, HTML has been used as an intercommunication medium for the Web. Web-Based Information Systems (WBISs) is the most general class of Web sites being fully distributed, platform-independent and having a hypertextual user interface. XML is emerging as a new standard for data exchange and data representation on the Internet. The W3C Consortium is responsible for the development of standards for the Web. In this dissertation we have showed how XSL and XPath could be used to meet the query requirements of SWISS-PROT, which is a WBIS. We have showed that XSL offers some level of extensibility as a query language for SWISS-PROT, but if queries were to be extended to a high level of complexity XQuery would be more appropriate to use since using XSL for this purpose includes hand-coding of for-loops and if-statements. Another problem is related to maintenance. Updating the structure of the XML source would include updating hand-coded for-loops and if-statements. There is still no recommendation available for XQuery at the W3C Consortium. Considering other factors of information management, we have showed that XSL and XPath would play a significant role in displaying and formatting information in SWISS-PROT. This would though require that Web browsers in SWISS-PROT have standardised support for XML.</p>

This paper describes the design and initial implementation of a web-based financial information system, intended to replace a Microsoft Access financial database in support of a federally funded, international health project. This system is being reimplemented for the web in order to provide stakeholders across the country (and potentially around the world) access to the project's financial information.