Healthcare is a large and growing industry that is experiencing major transformation in its information technology base. IS confronted similar transformations in other industries and developed theories and methods that should prove useful in healthcare applications. In turn, IS may benefit from incorporating knowledge from health informatics, a discipline that studies IT within medical and heal...

Theories of the Origin of Life can be categorised as ‘template replication first’ and ‘metabolism first’. A key question for metabolism first theories is the mechanism for transfer of inherited information. Earlier work presented a mechanism based on catalytic cycles, along with supporting results from the SimSoup artificial chemistry simulator. The current paper presents an enhanced SimSoup mo...

The present article aims to provide a theoretical foundation for the evaluation and categorization of the knowledge domain of Chain and Network Science (CNS). It aims to clarify what the field of CNS includes and to investigate where we stand in developing CNS. It elaborates on a number of important theories that provide insight in the structure and activities of actors in chains and networks, ...

This paper summarizes the wide and fragmented literature on strategic alliance formation. A framework is developed to organize the extant literature into antecedents, motives and objectives of alliance formation, and incorporates five relevant theories to explain a firm’s motives to form an alliance. The definition and delineation of the framework stages helps to categorize the literature and i...

Web interventions are gaining popularity in trying to change a person’s behavior. However, poorly designed intervention websites will affect the learning process of a person, what more to remember the content that they have learnt. The objective of this paper is to discuss the design of a web intervention using Gagne’s Condition of Learning Theory and cognitive dissonance. The usage of learning...

In this work we study, on a sample of 2.3 million individuals, how Facebook users consumed different information at the edge of political discussion and news during the last Italian electoral competition. Pages are categorized, according to their topics and the communities of interests they pertain to, in a) alternative information sources (diffusing topics that are neglected by science and mai...

Acknowledgements: Clark Glymour and Michael Strevens made extremely helpful comments on

The first part of the article offers an historical overview of metaphors, starting from Aristotle and the classical definition of metaphor. Chomsky's contribution to cognitive psychology is also mentioned together with Rosch’s and Kay and McDaniel’s research concerning categorization. The end of the first part contains new theories of metaphor, thus establishing the link to the second part, whi...

We propose a grounded ontological theory of channel networks to categorize features, like junctions, in road network databases. The theory is grounded, because its primitives can be given an unambiguous interpretation into directly observable qualities of physical road networks, like supported movements and their medium, connectedness of such media, and turnoff restrictions. The theory provides...