Information Brokers Research Articles

Information Handling Trends in Business Information Scenario: from Past to Present

Starts with the way of use of information by different business organizations in the changed information scenario as the requirements are changed. Discusses about the nature of information required for running the industries and various areas, components and steps in information handling. Emphasizes important aspects of online information services with the idea that information transfer among the business community is an important element for innovation. Also reflects new emerged professional “information brokers”. Concludes by giving examples of Centres for providing business information as National centre for Trade Information (NCTI) and United Nation Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO).

Establishing an International Reference Image Database for Research and Development in Medical Image Processing

Summary Introduction: The lack of comparability of evaluation results is one of the major obstacles of research and development in Medical Image Processing (MIP). The main reason for that is the usage of different image datasets with different quality, size and Gold standard. Objectives: Therefore, one of the goals of the Working Group on Medical Image Processing of the European Federation for Medical Informatics (EFMI WG MIP) is to develop first parts of a Reference Image Database. Methods: Kernel of the concept is to identify highly relevant medical problems with significant potential for improvement by MIP, and then to provide respective reference datasets. The EFMI WG MIP has primarily the role of a specifying group and an information broker, while the provider user relationships are defined by bilateral co-operation or license agreements. Results: An explorative database prototype has been implemented using the MySQL database software on the Web. Templates for provider user agreements have been worked out and already applied for own ‘pre-RID-MIP’ co-operations of the authors. Discussion and Conclusion: First steps towards a comprehensive reference image database have been done. Issues like funding, motivation, management, provision of Gold standards and evaluation guidelines are to be solved. Due to the interest from research groups and industry the efforts will be continued.

Evidence-Based Endocrinology

Evidence-based medicine is the judicious, conscientious, and explicit use of the best available evidence from clinical research in making clinical decisions. This definition recognizes a hierarchy of evidence that arranges study designs by their susceptibility to bias. The top of the hierarchy includes n-of-1 trials, systematic reviews of randomized trials, and single randomized trials reporting patient-important outcomes. The bottom of the hierarchy includes physiologic studies and unsystematic clinical observations. The definition posits that evidence alone is never enough to guide clinical decisions. In addition to evidence from clinical research, decision making requires careful and expert assessment of the patient's circumstances and elicitation of the patient's values and preferences. The latter should drive decisions, particularly when the trade-offs (of benefit and risk) are close or unclear. The evidence-based medicine process involves: (i) asking an answerable question; (ii) acquiring the best available evidence; (iii) appraising the evidence to judge the strength of inference of its results; and (iv) applying the results to the individual patient. Evidence-based endocrinology is hindered by limited high-level evidence assessing patient-important outcomes, limited systematic summaries of this evidence, lack of time, and lack of systematic training of endocrinologists in evidence-based medicine. Current endocrine practice may require a redesign to enhance the role of endocrinologists as information brokers for colleagues and patients. In the last 10 years, evidence-based medicine has matured as a philosophy of clinical care and medical education. An appraisal of its role in endocrinology awaits the pervasion of its principles into all of endocrine practice.

Paying for it: the current state of the information broking market

This article attempts to set the scene for the current state of the information broking industry and provide some prognosis for its future. There is no doubt that the nature of information broking has undergone considerable change in recent years. Much of the market for traditional intermediary services has vanished and the author provides an analysis of the supply of company information to highlight these changes. The impact of the Internet on the industry is assessed and two contrasting case studies of players within the sector are also provided in a commentary on the current state of the industry. Thoughts on how the future will look are also offered, with the conclusion reached that, to prosper, information brokers must adapt, innovate and be totally intuitive to the client’s needs.

Skills are not enough

This article argues that journalism can be taught as, and should be regarded as, a serious academic discipline and not simply a vocational training. Trends in society and polity place new responsibilities on, and require a better education of journalists. They must be equipped to make essential contributions as analysts and brokers of information. Journalism education has aspects specific to it: the particular balance of academic, applied and occupational learning; simulations of real working experience and engagement with the world; the conformity to professional standards of behaviour; the involvement with local communities; the application of the competency concept in assessment criteria; the high degree of transferability of skills, particularly research and composition skills. This combination can make for stimulating courses which provide a useful base for many types of work in later life and which compare favourably with other social science and humanities disciplines.

The value of private sector business credit information sharing: The US case

This paper investigates the value added by private information exchanges that share information on business payment performance. We discuss how this information is collected and disseminated by the world’s largest private information broker, Dun & Bradstreet. We provide the first empirical examination of the importance of this information at the lending decision level. Our findings indicate that exchange-generated information provides significant explanatory power in failure prediction models controlling for other credit information that is easily available to lenders. Our study complements the work of Jappelli and Pagano [Information sharing, lending and defaults; Cross country evidence, Centre for Economic Policy Research, Discussion Paper 2184, 1999] who find in cross-country macro level tests that information exchanges add value.

Relationship-specific antecedents of customer involvement in new product development

Research in new product development (NPD) has identified customer involvement as an important means to accelerate product development, to reduce development costs, and to enhance new product value. This is grounded in the wealth of customers' knowledge due to their product and market experiences. Therefore, customer involvement may provide access to innovative product ideas, new technologies, market information, and development capabilities that the manufacturer lacks in-house. Whilst much has been written about the potential benefits of partnering with customers, only few researchers have attempted to document empirically the factors that foster customer involvement in NPD. This study examines the influence of relationship management tasks on customer involvement in NPD using data from more than 233 supplier-customer relationships. Our findings suggest that five relationship management tasks have a strong impact on customer involvement in NPD. Relationship sponsoring, technological consulting, information brokering, representing interests, and coordinating cooperative activities are crucial for integrating customers into NPD processes. Mutual trust and mutual commitment as well as mutual adaptations by the partner firms are further important factors for customer involvement in NPD. Based on these findings, this study discusses several theoretical and managerial implications.

Analysis of Horizontal Gene Transfer and Clustering of Microbial ORFs by Use of a GRID Environment

Tsunami of biological data and multiple views of the data analysis require an expandable and flexible information environment. GRID computing is expected to be the solution. We prepared a computational environment composed of 5 sites in OBIGrid [6] and succeeded in analyzing horizontal gene transfer and clusters of ORFs of more than 100 microbial genomes that were stored in the Genome Information Broker [1] as of May, 2003. This scheme is being applied to more than 300 thousands ORFs of genomic sequences of 124 microbial species.

DNA Data Bank of Japan (DDBJ) in XML.

The DNA Data Bank of Japan (DDBJ, http://www.ddbj.nig.ac.jp) has collected and released more entries and bases than last year. This is mainly due to large-scale submissions from Japanese sequencing teams on mouse, rice, chimpanzee, nematoda and other organisms. The contributions of DDBJ over the past year are 17.3% (entries) and 10.3% (bases) of the combined outputs of the International Nucleotide Sequence Databases (INSD). Our complete genome sequence database, Genome Information Broker (GIB), has been improved by incorporating XML. It is now possible to perform a more sophisticated database search against the new GIB than the ordinary BLAST or FASTA search.

The internet and home purchase

In the pre–internet era, information was a key determinant of the geographic nature of intra–urban moves. Information was a far more limited commodity, and therefore subject to management and even manipulation. Information brokers, particularly real estate agents, could order and limit the kinds of information to which prospective buyers gained access, with the potential of strongly biasing search space. In the past few years, a vastly enriched information source on housing vacancies has become available through real estate industry–sponsored sites on the internet. This rich information source has the potential to influence spatial patterns and processes in the search for housing by eliminating information barriers in the search process. Three hypotheses were tested with data from Wake County (Rayleigh), North Carolina. First, those with less prior familiarity with the destination area would make more frequent use of the internet. Second, internet users would visit fewer houses personally because they would have more prior information about the market, eliminating the need for some personal home visits. Third, internet users, armed with greater information about the house, neighbourhood, and prices of other recent sales, would pay less for the same housing/neighbourhood bundle. Recent movers in Wake County, North Carolina, were surveyed in early 2000, and the characteristics of web users were compared with nonusers. The major finding of this research is that to date, the internet has had little impact on search patterns, except that those using the internet tend to visit a larger number of houses personally than those who do not use the world wide web as an information source.

Revenues for Online Newspapers: Owner and User Perceptions

The newspaper industry faces hard questions about business models and economic success for their online newspaper ventures. Managers, editors-in-chief and designers at nine local newspapers in Sweden were interviewed. In addition, semi-structured interviews with 153 users/readers of the news services of these nine newspapers were also conducted. The analysis reveals differences in digital news product content and revenue generation. The paper suggests a new business model for digital news products that includes content-based revenue generation through personalization, archiving and versioning, approaches to advertising that involve more highly targeted market intermediation, and non-news activities covering advertisers and information brokerage. Results suggest that management and users agree on the importance of archives, personalized and deep news content, and a role for the newspaper as intermediary. However, users are not willing to pay for increased multimedia or an e-commerce site sponsored by the news site.

Discovering user communities on the Internet using unsupervised machine learning techniques

Interest in the analysis of user behaviour on the Internet has been increasing rapidly, especially since the advent of electronic commerce. In this context, we argue here for the usefulness of constructing communities of users with common behaviour, making use of machine learning techniques. In particular, we assume that the users of any service on the Internet constitute a large community and we aim to construct smaller communities of users with common characteristics. The paper presents the results of three case studies for three different types of Internet service: a digital library, an information broker and a Web site. Particular attention is paid on the different types of information access involved in the three case studies: query-based information retrieval, profile-based information filtering and Web-site navigation. Each type of access imposes different constraints on the representation of the learning task. Two different unsupervised learning methods are evaluated: conceptual clustering and cluster mining. One of our main concerns is the construction of meaningful communities that can be used for improving information access on the Internet. Analysis of the results in the three case studies brings to surface some of the important properties of the task, suggesting the feasibility of a common methodology for the three different types of information access on the Internet.

EXTENSIBLE INFORMATION BROKERS

The number and size of information services available on the internet has been growing exponentially over the past few years. This growth has created an urgent need for information agents that act as brokers in the sense that they can autonomously search, gather, and integrate information on behalf of a user. To remain useful, such brokers will have to evolve throughout their lifetime to keep up with evolving and ever-changing information services. This paper proposes a framework named XIB (eXtensible Information Brokers) for building and evolving information brokers. The XIB takes as input a description of required information services and supports the interactive generation of an integrated query interface. It also generates wrappers for each information service dynamically. Once the query interface and wrappers are in place, the user can specify a query and get back a result which integrates data from all wrapped information sources. The XIB depends heavily on XML-related techniques. More specifically, we use DTDs to model the input and output of each service, and XML to represent both input and output values. Based on such representations, the paper investigates service integration in the form DTD integration, and studies query decomposition in the form of XML element decomposition. Within the proposed framework, it is easy to add or remove information services to a broker, thereby facilitating maintenance, evolution and customization of information brokers.

Theory, Abstraction and Design in Medical Informatics

To analyze the scientific and engineering components of Medical Informatics. A clear characterization of these components should be undertaken to categorize different areas of Medical Informatics and create a research agenda for the future. We have adapted a classical ACM and IEEE report on computing to analyze Medical Informatics from three different viewpoints: Theory, Abstraction, and Design. We suggest that Medical Informatics can be considered from these three perspectives: (1) Theory, from which medical informaticians formally characterize the properties of the objects of study, creating new theories or using and adapting existing theories (e.g., from mathematics), (2) Abstraction, from which medical informaticians deal with all aspects of medical information and create new abstractions, methods, and technology-independent models, which can be experimentally verified, and (3) Design, from which medical informaticians develop systems or act as information brokers or advisors between medical and technology professionals, to improve the quality of computer applications in medicine. Based on this framework, we suggest that Medical Informatics has an independent scientific character, different from other applied informatics areas. Finally, we analyze these three perspectives using data mining in medicine.

Genome Information Broker (GIB): data retrieval and comparative analysis system for completed microbial genomes and more.

Genome Information Broker (GIB) is a powerful tool for the study of comparative genomics. GIB allows users to retrieve and display partial and/or whole genome sequences together with the relevant biological annotation. GIB has accumulated all the completed microbial genome and has recently been expanded to include Arabidopsis thaliana genome data from DDBJ/EMBL/GenBank. In the near future, hundreds of genome sequences will be determined. In order to handle such huge data, we have enhanced the GIB architecture by using XML, CORBA and distributed RDBs. We introduce the new GIB here. GIB is freely accessible at http://gib.genes.nig.ac.jp/.

Innovation management: experience from the perspective of the electric power industry

IBERDROLA's Corporate Unit for Research and Development (R&D) is charged with the task of defining the strategy, general policies, and criteria of technological innovation that shape the development of projects and the utilisation and commercialisation of products and services. With this aim in view, several tools to assist innovation management have been developed. The Technological Information Office (GIT) and the Database of Research Concepts and Contacts have been designed to promote knowledge of the firm's sphere of action. The role of the R&D Project Appraisal Methodology is to aid in the selection of innovative projects that afford a competitive advantage to the firm. The GIT is a service of IBERDROLA that responds to the technological monitoring requests of the professionals who work in the areas of Research, Technological Development, and Innovation. The GIT is part of an in-house information service and acts in the capacity of information broker making use of the technology of the World Wide Web (Intranet). The Database of Research Concepts and Contacts is one of the underpinnings of the GIT. This database furnishes information relative to leading institutions and researchers in their fields who carry out activities in technological areas of interest to IBERDROLA. The information gathered defines the scientific and technological environment that serves the firm as benchmark. The aim of R&D project appraisal methodology is to optimise the allocation of R&D resources through the prioritisation and selection of R&D projects and programs. To evaluate the merits of each project, as well as the costs and risks associated, criteria consistent with IBERDROLA's strategic objectives have been established. This article explains the characteristics of these tools and their different stages of exploitation, as well as the results obtained.

DNA Data Bank of Japan (DDBJ) for genome scale research in life science

The DNA Data Bank of Japan (DDBJ, http://www.ddbj.nig.ac.jp) has made an effort to collect as much data as possible mainly from Japanese researchers. The increase rates of the data we collected, annotated and released to the public in the past year are 43% for the number of entries and 52% for the number of bases. The increase rates are accelerated even after the human genome was sequenced, because sequencing technology has been remarkably advanced and simplified, and research in life science has been shifted from the gene scale to the genome scale. In addition, we have developed the Genome Information Broker (GIB, http://gib.genes.nig.ac.jp) that now includes more than 50 complete microbial genome and Arabidopsis genome data. We have also developed a database of the human genome, the Human Genomics Studio (HGS, http://studio.nig.ac.jp). HGS provides one with a set of sequences being as continuous as possible in any one of the 24 chromosomes. Both GIB and HGS have been updated incorporating newly available data and retrieval tools.

Research in multi-organizational processes and semantic information brokering at the LSDIS lab

The Large Scale Distributed Information Systems Lab (LSDIS) at the University of Georgia was established in the Fall of 1994 to perform research and technology development on two complementary themes in distributed information systems: Enabling Infocosm and Processes for Networked Organizations. Enabling Infocosm Theme. The merging of computers and communications with significant advances in networking infrastructure has made millions of information sources with wide varieties of information accessible. This capability gives us a vision of an information rich society infocosm, where we expect to have any information any where we want in (m)any form(s) for effective decision making and knowledge-centric activities, improved productivity, and fun. Emphasis of our research is on semantics (meaning and use) of information and semantic interoperability supported by an information brokering architecture. This is closely tied to the recent interest in Semantic Web, which is presented as “ the Web of data (and connections) with meaning in the sense that a computer program can learn enough about what the data means to process it (Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web, 1999). Our emphasis is on organizing and utilizing Web-based as well as enterprise content semantically, rather than though syntactic and structural methods.

Why Do Temporary Help Firms Provide Free General Skills Training?

Nominally free, unrestricted training in portable computer skills is offered by the majority of U.S. temporary help supply (THS) establishments, a practice that is inconsistent with the competitive model of training. This paper asks why temporary help firms provide free general skills training. The answer proposed is that in addition to skills formation, training plays an informational role at THS firms by eliciting private information about worker ability. The model is built on the premise that training is more productive and therefore valuable to high ability workers. Firms offer a package of training and initially lower wages that induces self-selection. Workers of high perceived ability choose training in anticipation of a steeper wage profile while low ability workers are deterred by limited expected gains. Firms profit from their sunk training investment via their short-run informational advantage about ability and thereby limited monopsony power. Market competition among THS firms reduces employer rents, yielding higher wages and more training. Detailed tests of the model using representative establishment data on wages and training find strong support. The analysis demonstrates that beyond providing spot market labor, THS firms gather and sell information about worker quality to clients. The rapid growth of THS as a labor market information broker implies that the demand for worker screening is rising.

Supply network strategy

This paper presents an argument that it is possible for an organisation to manage networks, but understanding this involves consideration of what is meant by “managing”. Based on prior research and data from a major longitudinal action research study in the health sector, the paper describes six network management roles: network structuring agent; co‐ordinator; advisor; information broker; relationship broker; innovation sponsor. The necessary “assets” for effective performance of these roles are identified, in particular those relating to team competence. The findings enrich and significantly develop previous work on network management roles and activities, and their influencing factors. It is concluded that, given the specific nature of the networks studied, further research is required to evaluate the generalisability of the findings, though initial indications are promising.