Abstracts:

Witold Abramowicz
Department of Information Technology, University of Economics, Poznan, Poland; abramowi@novci1.ae.poznan.pl
Marcin Paprzycki
Department of Computer Science and Statistics, University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg,MS 39604, USA; m.paprzycki@usm.edu

(pp. 1-2)

Jerzy. A. Kisielnicki
Faculty of Management, Warsaw University, Szturmowa Str. 3, 02-678 Warsaw, Poland; kis@ocelot.uw.wz.edu.pl

The aim of this paper is to present the basic principles of operating of a new type of an enterprise -- virtual organization. Virtual organization is a product of the information era society. This idea is based on the free access rule. The reason for creating the virtual organization is to increase profits. The profit of individual companies operating as the virtual organization is bigger than in the case of operating separately. The virtual organizations are the result of the Information Technology (Networks, Databases). The aims, principles, activities, strategic analysis and future tendencies of the virtual organization applications are presented and discussed. (pp. 3-10)

Keywords:virtual organization, global organization, information technology, information society

Rainer Thome and Heiko Schinzer
Department of Business Computing, University of Wuerzburg, Wuerzburg,Germany; thome@wiinf.uni-wuerzburg.de

The paper presents and overview of the most important issues related to the Internet-based electronic commerce. The market potential and scenarios of participation are introduced. Role of most important service providers for the electronic commerce is discussed and illustrated using examples primarily based on the German electronic commerce market. (pp. 11-20)

Keywords:Intranet, Internet, Electronic Commerce, Electronic Marketplace, Communities of Interest Networks

Albert Endres
Department of Computer Science, University of Stuttgart, D-70565 Stuttgart, Germany; Endres@informatik.uni-stuttgart.de

In the future many goods and services will be traded in the electronic market. This will include information products as carriers of scientific and technical knowledge. The electronic market has the potential to overcome some of the shortcomings of the conventional market, but will also have its own peculiarities. The MeDoc project is exploring important aspects of the electronic market for scientific literature in computer science. A number of publishers, libraries and users are cooperating in order to propagate and to evaluate the use of books and journals as online offerings.(pp. 21-28)

Keywords:electronic publishing,digital libraries, electronic commerce, information market

Janusz Stoklosa
Poznan University of Technology, pl. Sklodowskiej-Curie 5, 60-965 Poznan, Poland; jsto@agat.sk-kari.put.poznan.pl

The real world payment models and electronic schemes implementing them are presented in this paper. It is outlined that the cryptographic techniques play an important role in the implementations. In the payment protocols appear such cryptographic services as confidentiality, digital signature, integrity, access control and non-repudiation. The authentication of users and the key management are very important as well. (pp.29-34)

Keywords:cryptography, payment systems, digital signature, cryptographic standards

Wojciech Cellary, Krzysztof Walczak and Waldemar Wieczerzycki
Department of Information Technology, University of Economics, 60-854 Poznan,Poland; cellary@kti.ae.poznan.pl

In the paper a new approach to the organization and management of business processes by enterprises which use advanced information technologies is presented. The proposed data model allows flexible modeling of processes which can evolve over time, thus precisely reflecting dynamic changes of the enterprise management procedures. A single process model may be available in different variants. These variants reflect alternatives in the management procedures which relate to exceptions, different triggering events, different time periods, resource limitations, etc. The proposed approach is based on both the database technology and the intranet technology, thus enabling practically unlimited flow of information between all employees of an enterprise, coordination of their collaborative work, decision support and wide access to the legacy systems. (pp.35-46)

Keywords:intranet, workflow management, database applications, version control

Piotr Dzikowski
Talex Sp. z o.o., ul. Pultuska 10, Poznan, Poland; piotrd@talex.com.pl

This paper reviews the technology, customer requirements, and architecture behind BEA Jolt and BEA TUXEDO - the products which can enable users to bring new or existing applications to the Internet almost immediately, using the expertise they already have, with the reliability and scalability that mission- critical applications demand. This allows users to use both complex client/server and commercial on-line transaction processing (OLTP) applications with scalability, flexibility, and maintainability to stand up to the rigorous requirements of today's information-driven business world. (pp. 47-54)

Keywords:Internet transactions, on-line transaction processing OLTP, middleware, scalability, TUXEDO, distributed transaction processing, Java

Dariusz Smoczynski
TALEX-PSO, ul. Lacina 1, 61-132 Poznan, Poland; dareks@talex.com.pl

Information systems used in many organizations are wholly based on a single relational database technology such as Informix or Progress. The emerging of new software technologies makes it possible to add more functionality to working database applications. The question is what solutions to choose? As a software company we see that the most promising technologies seem to be intranet, workflow, SGML and middleware. (pp.55-60)

Keywords:small and medium size business information systems, Intranet, middleware, application development

Hugo Moortgat
Business Analysis and Computing Systems, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, California 94132; moortgat@sfsu.edu

This paper investigates the use of communication satellite systems in implementing two different types of services: Personal Communication Networks and Broadband Internet. It first introduces the main objectives of Personal Communication Networks and explains why wireless systems are best suited to satisfy their requirements. Next, it motivates the idea that the future Internet is to be a broadband network with bandwidth on demand and quality-of-service guarantees. Further, it reviews the principal characteristics of geostationary, low earth orbit, and medium earth orbit satellites and satellite systems. Finally, it presents some key commercial systems which are currently being deployed or are in an advanced design stage and will provide wireless Personal Communication Networks or broadband Internet service on a global scale. (pp.61-68)

Keywords:satellite communication, wireless communication, Internet, personal communication networks, data communication, voice communication

Paule Ecimovic
University of Ljubljana, Department of Philosophy, Aker?eva 2, Ljubljana, Slovenia; ecimovic@ctklj.ctk.si

In the first part, the Byzantine Agreement problem in parallel distributed processing is formulated for generalized, completely-interconnected networks of interacting processors. An overview of the main cases of this problem are presented in brief. Among standard optimal algorithms for reaching Simultaneous Byzantine Agreement, only the two-phase commit protocol is set out in any detail. In the second part, the process of pattern formation in Hopfield linear associators, realized as single-layer neural networks with Hebbian weight adjustment rules, is discussed. The main result of the paper is then presented, according to which pattern formation in Hopfield linear associators is a solution to a form of Simultaneous Byzantine Agreement. In conclusion, it is argued that such associative memory solutions to interactive consistency problems in generalized transaction processing systems may finally prove viable, despite decades of neglect due to inavailability or prohibitive expense of sufficient processing power for their large-scale implementation. (pp.69-74)

Keywords:PDP, neural networks, Byzantine Agreement, patterns, attractors, interactive consistency, convergence, fault tolerance, k-resilience, distributed protocols, two-phase commit, Ising spin quantum computers

Yonggun Cho and Jin H. Kim
Department of Computer Science, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology,Kusong-dong, Yusong-gu, Taejon, 305-701, Korea; ygcho@ai.kaist.ac.kr
Vladimir Ignat'evich Shin
Department of Mathematics, Institute of Informatics Problems, Russian Academy of Sciences, 30/6, st. Vavilova, Moscow, 117900, GSP-1, Russia

The objective of data fusion is to combine elements of raw data from different sources into a single set of meaningful information that is of greater benifit than the sum of its contributing parts. In (Yonggun Cho et al. 1996) we developed data fusion methods for a class of linear and nonlinear continuous dynamic systems with multidimensional observation vector. In this paper we present a generalization of these methods to the fusion of dependent estimates and also to discrete stochastic systems determined by difference equation. The proposed fusion methods allow fully parallel processing of information and fit in with multisensor environment. Examples demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed fusion methods. (pp.75-84)

Keywords:multisensor, data fusion, kalman filter, correlation

Mengchi Liu
Department of Computer Science, University of Regina, Regina, Saskatchew, Canada S4S 0A2; mliu@cs.uregina.ca

ROL is a deductive object-oriented database system developed at the University of Regina. It supports important object-oriented features such as object identity, complex objeCTS, classes, class hierarchies, multiple inheritance with overriding and blocking, and schema definition. It also supports structured values such as functor objects and sets, providing powerful mechanisms for representing both partial and complete information about sets. It provides a uniform declarative language for defining, manipulating and querying databases. This paper describes the structure and operation of ROL. (pp. 85-94)

Keywords:deductive object-oriented databases, deductive databases, object-oriented databases, logic programming

Mitja Peru
National Institute of Chemistry, Lab. for Molecular Modeling and NMR, Hajdrihova 19 (POB 3430), SI-1001 Ljubljana, Slovenia; mitja.perus@uni-lj.si

The problem of consciousness is discussed by considering and commenting on theories of mental representations, judgements, feelings and a subject's self-aware qualitative experience. These characteristics of consciousness are correlated with materialistic background processes, except qualia which have, as it is argued, no obvious connection with naturalistic explanatory framework. (pp. 95-102)

Keywords:consciousness, representations, intentionality, judgements, self-consciousness, I, qualia, brain networks