IT really doesn’t require a turn of the century to get computing professionals to address the enigma of system integration. It’s been an ongoing practice—complete with professional and financial headaches—since organizations realized the rich benefits of building, layering, and evolving their own unique information systems and application domains. Considering the critical role system integration plays […]
June 2000 - Vol. 43 No. 6
Features
The tradition-bound institution may be late to the e-vironment, but many legal scholars are still stunned to learn the highest court in the U.S. opened its own Web site in mid-April (www.supremecourstus.gov). Many of the court’s written decisions will be posted online, as well as upcoming cases, opinions, orders, and arguments. The site makes it […]
This letter is a response to various points of view expressed in the March 2000 Communications. For want of a better title, I will call it a manifesto: entitled “A Plea for Dumb Computers.” The focus of the issue is improvement of the human-computer interface. The articles in the special section on perceptual user interfaces […]
Legally Speaking: Libel and Slander on the Internet
The Internet adds a new dimension to the power of words, challenging our freedom of speech as we know it.
Electronic Frontier: Bad Moon Rising
We might be in for some nasty weather with the marriage of content providers and cable companies.
Log on Education: Teachers and Technology: Easing the Way
As technology professionals, parents, and community members, how can we help grade school teachers integrate technology into the classroom?
Viewpoint: Why We Must Fight -UCITA
If UCITA is adopted, it will threaten the free software community with disaster.
Viewpoint: The Internet Patent Land Grab
At about 6 p.m., February 29, I posted an open letter to Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com on my Web site. I asked my customers to join me in protesting Amazon.com’s suit against Barnes & Noble for infringing Amazon.com’s "1-Click" patent. This event made news because my company sells hundreds of thousands of books each year […]
Information System Integration
For information systems, it is increasingly difficult to draw a line around an application system and say that you own and control it. For example, as value chains extend beyond enterprises, supplier and customer systems become part of each other’s information architectures. Furthermore, in many application areas, data is distributed over a multitude of heterogeneous, […]
Interoperation Support For Electronic Business
Integrated value chains that consist of business alliance partners compete as single entities for customers.
The SI Challenge in Health Care
The inability to share information across systems and between care organizations is just one of the major impediments in the health care business's progress toward efficiency and cost-effectiveness.
Maintaining Data Warehouses Over Changing Information Sources
Tomorrow's Web applications need a robust, efficient data warehouse system to succeed in dynamic Web-based environments.
Scaling on an international level requires integrating independently evolved systems.
Emerging Mobile and Wireless Networks
Wireless and mobile networks are quickly becoming the networks of choice, not only because of large bandwidth, but due to the flexibility and freedom they offer.
The MVD architecture heralds a document model supporting deep extension to novel and arbitrary aspects of document functionality, even distributed in situ annotation.
Is Telemedicine a Practical Reality?
The behemoths of managed health care and the digital age are converging as quickly as the technology allows.
Companies worldwide may recognize the marketing potential of the Internet, but using it to its full potential is often ignored.
A Paradigm Shift in the Distribution of Multimedia
RWANDA, a dynamic transport protocol, puts the "active" in interactive multimedia.
Technical Opinion: The Real Challenges of Mobile Agents
Mobile agents provide an innovative concept for creating distributed systems. Being mobile means the ability of a computational entity to move itself from one system to another in the same network. Acting and interacting with compatible objects in the temporary host system expresses the core idea behind mobile agents, that is, bringing the computation to […]
Inside Risks: Risks of Internet Voting
Risks in computer-related voting have been discussed here by Peter Neumann in November 1990 and by Rebecca Mercuri in November 1992 and 1993. Recently we’ve seen the rise of a new class of likely risks in this area, directly related to the massive expansion of the Internet and Web. This is not a theoretical issue—the […]
