This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Asia-Pacific Digital Libraries, ICADL 2021, which was held in December 2021. Due to COVID-19 pandemic the conference was held virtually. The 17 full, 14 short, and 5 practice papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 87 submissions. The papers were organized in topical sections named: Knowledge Discovery from Digital Collections; Search for Better User Experience; Information Extraction; Multimedia; Text Classification and Matching; Data Infrastructure for Digital Libraries; Data Modeling; Neural-based Learning.

Digital New Deal analyses the origins of law and its relationship to language and economics and identifies 12 symptoms that point to an authoritarian involution of our democracies. It refuses to indulge in pro-forma techno-optimism. Neither does it pessimistically predict inescapable doom. A bright future is still possible, if we correctly understand the digital equivalents of categories such as identity, persona, home, document, signature, freedom and the close relationship between our fundamental rights and their digital equivalents. Riccardo Genghini’s research on a natural law for a digital society has been influenced in particular by Galgano, Popper, Sebeok, Rawls, Ong, Irti, Searle and Ferraris. As professor at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milano, his lessons (2007- 2017) on commercial law focussed on comparing the law merchant of the Middle Ages with the commercial practices of IT companies as Microsoft, eBay, Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft. First with CEN, now with ETSI, he steers the European standardisation on PKI and trust services since 1999.

A culture of trust is usually claimed to have many public benefits--by lubricating markets, managing organizations, legitimating governments, and facilitating collective action. Any signs of its decline are, and should be, a matter of serious concern. Yet, In Praise of Skepticism recognizes that trust has two faces. Confidence in anti-vax theories has weakened herd immunity. Faith in Q-Anon conspiracy theories triggered insurrection. Disasters flow from gullible beliefs in fake Covid-19 cures, Madoff pyramid schemes, Russian claims of Ukrainian Nazis, and the Big Lie denying President Biden's legitimate election. Trustworthiness involves an informal social contract by which principals authorize agents to act on their behalf in the expectation that they will fulfill their responsibilities with competency, integrity, and impartiality, despite conditions of risk and uncertainty. Skeptical judgments reflect reasonably accurate and informed predictions about agents' future actions based on their past performance and guardrails deterring dishonesty, mendacity, and corruption. We should trust but verify. Unfortunately, assessments are commonly flawed. Both cynical beliefs (underestimating performance) and credulous faith (over-estimating performance) involve erroneous judgements reflecting cultural biases, poor cognitive skills, and information echo chambers. These conclusions draw on new evidence from the European Values Survey/World Values Survey conducted among over 650,000 respondents in more than 100 societies over four decades. In Praise of Skepticism warns that an excess of credulous trust poses serious and hitherto unrecognized risks in a world full of seductive demagogues playing on our insecurities, lying swindlers exploiting our greed, and silver-tongued conspiracy theorists manipulating our darkest fears.

This book explores the implications of descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive digital enterprises and their practices for different functional domains and in different counties during COVID-19. This book will bring new dimensions of study to the concept of digital enterprises which is sure to change after COVID-19 as it has upended the way in which people work, live and communicate. Covering a broad range of topics related to digital enterprises, this book is meant for business owners, digital professionals, managers, researchers, and academics who are seeking to integrate digital enterprises in order to allow organizations and countries to stay on a sustainable development trajectory while living with COVID-19.

I3E 2001 is the first in a series of conferences on e-commerce, e-business, and- government organised by the three IFIP committees TC6, TC8, and TC11. It provides a forum, where users, engineers, and scientists from academia, industry, and government can present their latest findings in e-commerce, e-business, and- government applications and the underlying technology to support those applications. The conference comprises a main track and mini tracks dedicated to special topics. The papers presented in the main track were rigorously refereed and selected by the International Programme Committee of the conference. Thematically they were grouped in the following sessions: – Sessions on security and trust, comprising nine papers referring to both trust and security in general as well as presenting specific concepts for enhancing trust in the digital society. – Session on inter-organisational transactions, covering papers related to auditing of inter-organizational trade procedures, cross-organizational workflow and transactions in Business to Business platforms. – Session on virtual enterprises, encompassing papers describing innovative approaches for creating virtual enterprises as well as describing examples of virtual enterprises in specific industries. – Session on online communities containing three papers, which provide case studies of specific online communities and various concepts on how companies can build and harness the potential of online communities. – Sessions on strategies and business models with papers describing specific business models as well as general overviews of specific approaches for E- Strategy formulation.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Asia-Pacific Digital Libraries, ICADL 2021, which was held in December 2021. Due to COVID-19 pandemic the conference was held virtually. The 17 full, 14 short, and 5 practice papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 87 submissions. The papers were organized in topical sections named: Knowledge Discovery from Digital Collections; Search for Better User Experience; Information Extraction; Multimedia; Text Classification and Matching; Data Infrastructure for Digital Libraries; Data Modeling; Neural-based Learning.

Inclusive and sustainable economic growth in the six Western Balkan (WB6) economies depends on greater economic competitiveness. Although the gap is closing gradually, the standards of living in WB6 are well below those of the OECD and EU. Accelerating the rate of socio-economic convergence will require a holistic and growth oriented approach to policy making. This is the fourth study of the region (formerly under the title 'Competitiveness in South East Europe') and it comprehensively assesses policy reforms in the WB6 economies across 15 policy areas key to strengthening their competitiveness. It enables WB6 economies to compare economic performance against regional peers, as well as EU-OECD good practices and standards, and to design future policies based on rich evidence and actionable policy recommendations. The regional profile presents assessment findings across five policy clusters crucial to accelerating socio-economic convergence of the WB6 by fostering regional co-operation: business environment, skills, infrastructure and connectivity, digital transformation and greening. Economy-specific profiles complement the regional assessment, offering each WB6 economy an in-depth analysis of their policies supporting competitiveness. They also track the implementation of the previous 2021 study's recommendations and provide additional ones tailored to the economies’ evolving challenges. These recommendations aim to inform structural economic reforms and facilitate the region’s socio-economic convergence towards the standards of the EU and OECD.