This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th Asia-Pacific Web Conference, APWeb 2006. More than 100 papers cover all current issues on WWW-related technologies and new advanced applications for researchers and practitioners from both academic and industry.

As information systems become ever more pervasive in an increasing number of fields and professions, workers in healthcare and medicine must take into consideration new advances in technologies and infrastructure that will better enable them to treat their patients and serve their communities. Healthcare Administration: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications brings together recent research and case studies in the medical field to explore topics such as hospital management, delivery of patient care, and telemedicine, among others. With a focus on some of the most groundbreaking new developments as well as future trends and critical concerns, this three-volume reference source will be a significant tool for medical practitioners, hospital managers, IT administrators, and others actively engaged in the healthcare field.

The Challenge of Energy Security in the 21st Century: Trends of Significance seeks to inform all those concerned about energy security, whether national, regional or international bodies, of certain factors which must be taken into consideration in developing their energy security policies and pursuing their respective objectives. Towards that end this book reveals certain significant trends of importance to the major energy-producing and energy-consuming regions. Through its unique analysis it sheds light on how such trends will affect the energy security policies of all the producers and consumers of energy, large and small, in one form or another, in the foreseeable future.

This textbook introduces new business concepts on cloud environments such as secure, scalable anonymity and practical payment protocols for the Internet of things and Blockchain technology. The protocol uses electronic cash for payment transactions. In this new protocol, from the viewpoint of banks, consumers can improve anonymity if they are worried about disclosure of their identities in the cloud. Currently, there is not a book available that has reported the techniques covering the protocols with anonymizations and Blockchain technology. Thus this will be a useful book for universities to purchase. This textbook provides new direction for access control management and online business, with new challenges within Blockchain technology that may arise in cloud environments. One is related to the authorization granting process. For example, when a role is granted to a user, this role may conflict with other roles of the user or together with this role; the user may have or derive a high level of authority. Another is related to authorization revocation. For instance, when a role is revoked from a user, the user may still have the role. Experts will get benefits from these challenges through the developed methodology for authorization granting algorithm, and weak revocation and strong revocation algorithms.

Clustering and Classification, Data Analysis, Data Handling and Business Intelligence are research areas at the intersection of statistics, mathematics, computer science and artificial intelligence. They cover general methods and techniques that can be applied to a vast set of applications such as in business and economics, marketing and finance, engineering, linguistics, archaeology, musicology, biology and medical science. This volume contains the revised versions of selected papers presented during the 11th Biennial IFCS Conference and 33rd Annual Conference of the German Classification Society (Gesellschaft für Klassifikation - GfKl). The conference was organized in cooperation with the International Federation of Classification Societies (IFCS), and was hosted by Dresden University of Technology, Germany, in March 2009.

Accessing remote instrumentation worldwide is one of the goals of e-Science. The task of enabling the execution of complex experiments that involve the use of distributed scientific instruments must be supported by a number of different architectural domains, which inter-work in a coordinated fashion to provide the necessary functionality. These domains embrace the physical instruments, the communication network interconnecting the distributed systems, the service oriented abstractions and their middleware. The Grid paradigm (or, more generally, the Service Oriented Architecture -- SOA), viewed as a tool for the integration of distributed resources, plays a significant role, not only to manage computational aspects, but increasingly as an aggregator of measurement instrumentation and pervasive large-scale data acquisition platforms. In this context, the functionality of a SOA allows managing, maintaining and exploiting heterogeneous instrumentation and acquisition devices in a unified way, by providing standardized interfaces and common working environments to their users, but the peculiar aspects of dealing with real instruments of widely different categories may add new functional requirements to this scenario. On the other hand, the growing transport capacity of core and access networks allows data transfer at unprecedented speed, but new challenges arise from wireless access, wireless sensor networks, and the traversal of heterogeneous network domains. The book focuses on all aspects related to the effective exploitation of remote instrumentation and to the building complex virtual laboratories on top of real devices and infrastructures. These include SOA and related middleware, high-speed networking in support of Grid applications, wireless Grids for acquisition devices and sensor networks, Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning for real-time control, measurement instrumentation and methodology, as well as metrology issues in distributed systems.

Today’s global business environments drive companies to be more technology dependent, and to remain competitive, firms need to introduce or adopt a new technology to business. In order to achieve a successful integration with maximum return on investment, companies need a systematic approach that accommodates a comprehensive course of action of technology integration. Technology Integration to Business – Practical Methods and Case Studies suggests a business-driven holistic approach of technology integration that consists of several steps. First, companies should examine the current state, issues, benefits, and obstacles of technology integration in conjunction with their competitive business strategy and operational capability. Second, firms should investigate new, emerging business technologies as to how those technologies can contribute to improve the business. Third, with the technology integration needs identified, companies should complete preparatory tasks before actual implementation, such as, business process analysis, technology assessment, technology provider investigation, business case development, and cost-benefit analysis. Fourth, because the nature of technology integration project involves many stakeholders in global locations, firms should use effective project management knowledge from project initiation, through planning, execution, control, to close. Students will learn real-world technology integration processes in industry settings and become more prepared for industrial careers. Practitioners will find thorough procedures and methods that are useful in practice to improve business performance. Realistic examples for manufacturing, logistics, and supply chain management application domains give the reader practical implications for the methods presented.