Information and knowledge management in online rich presence services

Abstract

Nowadays many information technology services are moving towards online via ubiquitous networks, computing and information at unlimited speed anytime and anywhere with different kinds of technical platforms, especially in Web 2.0. In general, presence information expresses user willingness and ability to communicate with other users across a set of services for real-time communications. Web 2.0 uses the Web as a platform for embracing the interconnectivity and interactivity of Web-delivered content among different online users and communities, which have recently been assumed by the technology of services computing such as Web services. Web services are based on a set of XML standards such as Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI), Web Services Description Language (WSDL), Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS), and etc. The rapid development of Web 2.0 for massive social network collaboration facilitates the “rich presence services” to expose information and knowledge gathered through online social networks which assists intelligent decision making and analysis. Rich presence is described as an enhanced form of presence awareness in which a service can observe other online service/user attributes, such as personal identifiable information, location, time, behavior, movement, type-of-software, type-of-device, and type-of-network. The use of Web 2.0 technologies may generate both user-generated content as well as contextual information about users, for example, their current location and availability. Rich presence also refers to the aggregation of this information that makes presence attributed to consenting services available for use by other services/users. This result generates a consolidation of virtual, physical, and online services into a single richpresence platform based on content-based publish/subscribe services for efficient filtering and dissemination of presence information. Online rich presence services divulge only the availability of other services. In this context, knowledge management comprises a range of strategies and practices used in an online rich presence service to create, manage, coordinate, distribute, and enable adoption of information. Such information comprises knowledge, either embedded in services or embedded in business processes, focuses on organizational quality of services (QoS) objectives such as performance, and competitiveness. Therefore, this special issue aims to examine the information and knowledge management model in this emerging context for the next generation applications. All the 8 papers in this issue will have deep research results to report the advance of online rich presence services such as information discovery, knowledge management, recommendation and collaborative filtering, services compositions, supply chain management, trust framework, grid and cloud computing. In the first paper “Feasilibility and A Case Study on Content Optimization Services on Cloud” (Wong 2013), Wong focuses on content optimization services that modify and reorganize content to reduce the size of content and enhance the performance of processing on the content. Wong presents the economics related to these services with practical considerations when these services are implemented on a cloud, which is typically perceived to be a more economical and scalable option compared to traditional dedicated servers. C. K. Fung Boeing Research and Technology, Seattle, WA, USA e-mail: casey.k.fung@boeing.com