We model alternative institutional arrangements for building and managing facilities for provision of public services, including the use of the Private Finance Initiative (PFI), by exploring the effects on innovative investment activity by providers. The desirability of bundling the building and management operations is analyzed, and it is considered whether it is optimal to allocate ownership ...

In this paper, the authors introduce Web services technology and its applications to mobile business transactions. This paper shows that the Web services technology is a powerful tool to build next-generation e-Commerce applications for wireless mobile devices following the service-oriented architecture. Such an approach would bring significant benefits to organizations involved with e-Commerce...

Web Services offer great promise for integrating and automating software applications within and between enterprises over the Internet. However, ensuring that Web Services can satisfy their clients’ requests when their clients need them is a real challenge. In this paper we describe dependability technologies, including transparent SOAP connection failover, replication, checkpointing and messag...

Background: Chemical exposure is a major health problem globally. Poison control centers (PCCs) play a leading role both in developed and developing countries in the prevention and control of poisonous chemical exposures. In this study, we aimed to assess the current state of PCCs in Pakistan and highlight capacity building needs in these centers. Methods: A cross-sectional survey of the two re...

Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) techniques, like transformations, queries, and code generators, were devised for local, single-CPU architectures. However, the increasing complexity of the systems to be built and their high demands in terms of computation, memory and storage, requires more scalable and flexible MDE techniques, likely using services and the cloud. Nonetheless, the cost of developi...

! Building Business Applications using Web Services Gary Zeien IT Architect IBM Global Services/Business Integration Services November 5, 2001 !!!! Abstract ! There have been a lot of new tools being released lately that provide the foundation for the creation of Web Service based applications. Now we need to figure out how to use this power. How, for instance, could a packaged e-Commerce appli...

In this paper, the steps taken towards setup and configuration of the DiffServ testbed in our laboratory are listed. A topology is suggested and some simple experimental results for setup validation are presented. A DiffServ domain is deployed and several experiments are run. We obtained acceptable performance for a DiffServ Expedited Forwarding Per Hop Behavior in our testbed using Committed A...

Niamh A Fingleton, PhD Student, Academic Primary Care, University of Aberdeen, Polwarth Building, Foresterhill, Aberdeen, AB25 2ZD, UK Margaret C Watson, Health Foundation Improvement Science Fellow, Health Services Research Unit, Health Sciences Building, University of Aberdeen, Foresterhill, Aberdeen, AB25 2ZD Eilidh M Duncan, Research Fellow, Health Services Research Unit, Health Sciences Bu...