| It was to be expected that a new millennium should bring with it a flurry of observers claiming that we stand on the threshold of a new society. We have not been disappointed. The media excitement at the fantastic financial speculation on the high-tech and internet stock market is but one instance cited to support this claim. This new society is labelled variously the information society, the knowledge society, the knowledge economy or, as this book chooses for no particular reason, the ‘information age’. The contributors to this book examine various features of today’s world, and find little evidence of a new information society.
Yet it is the information age, we are assured, because the key commodity for the twenty-first century is information. The technological developments of the last two or three decades mean that information can be moved around the world at speeds qualitatively (as well as quantitatively) different from the transport of goods. The consequences are economic and political: the information industries need no longer be located within a confined geography, and thus may seek out labour wherever it is most profitably available; governments may need to adopt different approaches to their relationship with business, while at the same time deploying new technologies to make this new information more widely and equitably available. |
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 Use Case ModelingDevelopers who effectively employ use cases deliver better applications--on time and under budget. The concept behind use cases is perhaps as old as software itself; they express the behavior of systems in terms of how users will ultimately interact with them. Despite this inherent simplicity, the use case approach is frequently misapplied,... | | Semantic Grid: Model, Methodology, and Applications (Advanced Topics in Science and Technology in China)Semantic Grid: Model, Methodology, and Applications introduces to the science, core technologies, and killer applications. First, scientific issues of semantic grid systems are covered, followed by two basic technical issues, data-level semantic mapping, and service-level semantic interoperating. Two killer applications are then introduced to... | | |
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