Locating suitable resources within a Grid system is a computationally intensive process, with no guarantee of quality and suitability of the discovered resources. An alternative approach is to categorize resources based on the services they provide – leading to the interaction of peers with common goals to form societies/communities. Organization of resources in different communities is suggest...

the issue of medical errors is currently a global concern which places a heavy financial and emotional burden on communities. a clinical decision support system (cdss) is an electronic system designed to support clinical decision making. considering the increasing importance and use of systematized nomenclature of medicine-clinical terms (snomed-ct), we developed snomed-ct to implement it more ...

This paper examines the phenomena of social resistance over the Internet as an important current component of activities in virtual communities. It also examines the various instantiations of the self over the Internet. Research in virtual communities has focused on issues of design to facilitate commerce or information interchange, and on the relations in societies that define or are shaped by...

Bringing communities of buyers and sellers together in the arena of electronic commerce stimulates three major potentials: the building of trust, the collection and effective use of community knowledge and the economic impacts of accumulated buying power. In this context, we introduce the concept of Virtual Communities of Transaction and review important personalization approaches which we may ...

Monitoring communities has become increasingly easy on the web as the number of visualisation tools and amount of data available about communities increase. It is possible to visualise connections on social and professional networks such as Facebook in the form of mathematical graphs. It is also possible to visualise connections between authors of papers. In particular, Microsoft Academic Searc...

Social capital has recently emerged as an important interdisciplinary research area. It is frequently used as a framework for understanding various social issues in temporal communities, neighbourhoods and groups. In particular, researchers in the social sciences and the humanities have used social capital to understand trust, shared understanding, reciprocal relationships, social network struc...

This paper presents a study of how exaggerated facial expression in the lower face region affects perception of emotion and the Uncanny Valley phenomenon in realistic, human-like, virtual characters. Characters communicated the six basic emotions, anger, disgust, fear, sadness and surprise with normal and exaggerated mouth movements. Measures were taken for perceived familiarity and human-liken...

Current study aims to investigate the possible factors that influence online brand equity, which was measured by brand awareness, perceived quality, brand association and brand loyalty. The three predictors included in the research framework are online communication tools (which include online advertising and e-mail marketing), word of mouth and virtual community. An online questionnaire survey...

This chapter discusses cultures as analogues of actual environments, specifically socially constructed communities and the individuals who compose them. Analogues replace actual environments in human perception. Virtual communities provide context for this discussion. Virtual communities have evolved as analogues of actual communities to the degree that technology permits. Greater technological...