A Commerce of Knowledge tells the story of three generations of Church of England chaplains who worked in Ottoman Aleppo during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By reconstructing their careers, Simon Mills shows the links between English commercial and diplomatic expansion, and English scholarly and missionary interests.

A Commerce of Knowledge tells the story of three generations of Church of England chaplains who served the English Levant Company in Syria during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Reconstructing the careers of its protagonists in the cosmopolitan city of Ottoman Aleppo, Simon Mills investigates the links between English commercial and diplomatic expansion, and English scholarly and missionary interests: the study of Middle-Eastern languages; the exploration of biblical and Greco-Roman antiquities; and the early dissemination of Protestant literature in Arabic. Early modern Orientalism is usually conceived as an episode in the history of scholarship. By shifting the focus to Aleppo, A Commerce of Knowledge brings to light the connections between the seemingly separate worlds, tracing the emergence of new kinds of philological and archaeological enquiry in England back to a series of real-world encounters between the chaplains and the scribes, booksellers, priests, rabbis, and sheikhs they encountered in the Ottoman Empire. Setting the careers of its protagonists against a background of broader developments across Protestant and Catholic Europe, Mills shows how the institutionalization of English scholarship, and the later English attempt to influence the Eastern Christian churches, were bound up with the international struggle to establish a commercial foothold in the Levant. He argues that these connections would endure until the shift of British commercial and imperial interests to the Indian subcontinent in the second half of the eighteenth century fostered new currents of intellectual life at home.

Electronic Commerce is one of the most important aspects to emerge from the Internet. It allows people to exchange goods and services immediately, with no barriers of time or distance Initially, E-Commerce was primarily the domain of large firms, due to its initial format of customized, complex, and expensive transactions – essential barriers to entry by smaller competitors. Today, for a nominal fee, anyone may become an online merchant, with the potential to reach millions of consumers world-wide. In essence, the development of the Internet has had the same effect on E-Commerce as Henry Ford’s assembly line on the automotive industry. It has converted a luxury for the few into a relatively simple and inexpensive device for the masses. In this book, we will explore these impacts and innovations. The purpose of this book is to provide a preliminary analytical foundation (knowledge base), which then may be used for further, more advanced study. It is not intended to be an exhaustive analysis—yet at the same time provides as much information as possible to provide an accurate depiction of the current state and likely future direction of E-Commerce.

Information Markets is a compendium of the i-commerce, the commerce with digital information, content as well as software. Information Markets is a comprehensive overview of the state of the art of economic and information science endeavors on the markets of digital information. It provides a strategic guideline for information providers how to analyse their market environment and how to develop possible strategic actions. It is a book for information professionals, both for students of LIS (Library and Information Science), CIS (Computer and Information Science) or Information Management curricula and for practitioners as well as managers in these fields.

A decade ago in the Times Literary Supplement, Roderick Conway Morris claimed that “almost everything that was going to happen in book publishing—from pocket books, instant books and pirated books, to the concept of author’s copyright, company mergers, and remainders—occurred during the early days of printing.” Ian Maclean’s colorful survey of the flourishing learned book trade of the late Renaissance brings this assertion to life. The story he tells covers most of Europe, with Frankfurt and its Fair as the hub of intellectual exchanges among scholars and of commercial dealings among publishers. The three major religious confessions jostled for position there, and this rivalry affected nearly all aspects of learning. Few scholars were exempt from religious or financial pressures. Maclean’s chosen example is the literary agent and representative of international Calvinism, Melchior Goldast von Haiminsfeld, whose activities included opportunistic involvement in the political disputes of the day. Maclean surveys the predicament of underfunded authors, the activities of greedy publishing entrepreneurs, the fitful interventions of regimes of censorship and licensing, and the struggles faced by sellers and buyers to achieve their ends in an increasingly overheated market. The story ends with an account of the dramatic decline of the scholarly book trade in the 1620s, and the connivance of humanist scholars in the values of the commercial world through which they aspired to international recognition. Their fate invites comparison with today’s writers of learned books, as they too come to terms with new technologies and changing academic environments.

Ontologies have been developed and investigated for quite a while now in artificial intelligence and natural language processing to facilitate knowledge sharing and reuse. More recently, the notion of ontologies has attracted attention from fields such as intelligent information integration, cooperative information systems, information retrieval, electronic commerce, and knowledge management. The author systematically introduces the notion of ontologies to the non-expert reader and demonstrates in detail how to apply this conceptual framework for improved intranet retrieval of corporate information and knowledge and for enhanced Internet-based electronic commerce. In the second part of the book, the author presents a more technical view on emerging Web standards, like XML, RDF, XSL-T, or XQL, allowing for structural and semantic modeling and description of data and information.

Discover the Easy Way to Understand Commerce This interactive text provides you with knowledge, understanding, skills, and applied techniques required for passing the commerce exam the first attempt. The text is both user-friendly and closely related to current commercial practice, including recent developments. It offers the following features: Clear presentation and explanation in a straightforward English language Key concepts covered in the chapter summarized Key points covered in the chapter summarized Thought-provoking progress tests after each chapter intended to help students assess their own progress In-text highlighted application questions intended to help students apply to real-life situations