Electronic markets and the future internet: from clouds to semantics
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PREFACE
Electronic markets and the future internet: from clouds to semantics Ricardo Colomo-Palacios & Pedro Soto-Acosta & T. Ramayah & Meir Russ
Published online: 1 May 2013 # Institute of Information Management, University of St. Gallen 2013
Internet entrepreneurs are dramatically changing the business environment since the late 1990s by revolutionizing how business processes and transactions are conducted all over the world. In this sense, business networking revenues are increasing exponentially and the number of products/services available online for businesses and consumers are also growing steadily. However, questions remain unanswered regarding whether and how new Internet technologies such as the so called social web, the semantic web and cloud computing will bring new forms of business networking, business value creation activities and business models. The social web can be defined as the second generation of community-driven web services (Social Networking Site, blogs, wikis, and others) where everyone can communicate, participate, collaborate and refine the information space (Colomo-Palacios 2010; Paroutis and Al Saleh 2009). In other words, the social web encompasses the design of websites and software to support and foster social interaction. Social web technologies have become not only key tools for information and knowledge management within firms (Valencia-García et al. 2010), but also a required tool for competition and interaction with customers across many industries. These web sites allow R. Colomo-Palacios (*) Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Madrid, Spain e-mail: [email protected] P. Soto-Acosta Universidad de Murcia, Murcia, Spain e-mail: [email protected] T. Ramayah School of Management, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang, Malaysia e-mail: [email protected] M. Russ University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, Green Bay, WI, USA e-mail: [email protected]
knowledge creation and sharing by the interaction of employees and other stakeholders via blogs, wikis, forums and online social networks. At the same time, the potential of the social web has allowed firms not only to interact with customers but also to promote their products and services. In this sense, firms are more frequently adopting these new channels and technologies to improve their reputation and increase their market share. Shared ownership of brand, image and reputation are key benefits derived from the social Web (Jones and Iredale 2009). Despite all the above mentioned benefits resulting from the implementation of Internet technologies, traditional websites are designed to be read by people, not machines. In this sense, the advent of the semantic web has emerged in the form of new promising tools for information and data engineering (Vossen et al. 2007). The term “semantic web” was coined by Berners-Lee et al. (2001), to describe the evolution from a document-based web toward a new paradigm that includes data and information for computers to manipulate. The semantic web facilitates computers’ interpretation of information, so they can perform
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