Informatica

Trust is an important factor for successful e-commerce and e-media applications. However, these media inherently disable many ordinary communication channels and means, and affect trust forming factors. Therefore cyber environment requires additional support when it comes to trust. This is also one key reason why computational trust management methods are being developed now for some fifteen years, while another key reason is to enable better decision making through mathematical modeling and simulations in other areas. These methods are grounded on certain premises, which are analyzed in this paper. On this basis, Qualitative assessment dynamics (QAD for short) is presented that complements the above methods. As opposed to other methods, it is aligned with certain principles of human reasoning. Therefore it further extends the scope of other computational trust management technologies that are typically concerned with artificial ways of reasoning, while QAD gives a basis also for applications in ordinary environments where humans are involved. By using this methodology, experimental work will be presented, applied to the area of organizations and human factor management.

Due to numerous public information sources and services, many methods to combine heterogeneous data were proposed recently. However, general end-to-end solutions are still rare, especially systems taking into account different context dimensions. Therefore, the techniques often prove insufficient or are limited to a certain domain. In this paper we briefly review and rigorously evaluate a general framework for data matching and merging. The framework employs collective entity resolution and redundancy elimination using three dimensions of context types. In order to achieve domain independent results, data is enriched with semantics and trust. However, the main contribution of the paper is evaluation on five public domain-incompatible datasets. Furthermore, we introduce additional attribute, relationship, semantic and trust metrics, which allow complete framework management. Besides overall results improvement within the framework, metrics could be of independent interest.

Nowadays most required products and services of companies are provided through other organisations. Outsourcing as a new approach has a significant role in management literature. Supplier should be selected by executives, when the organization decides to acquire a product or service from other organizations. Concerning supplier selection, the managers should consider more than one factor or criterion, which may be inconsistent and contradictory. Therefore, supplier selection is a multi-criteria decision-making issue. Analytic network process (ANP) is a technique to solve multi-criteria decision-making problems in which the criteria affect each other and have nonlinear correlation. In this study, the goal is to use ANP to select the supplier in a group decision-making.