Open Standards And The Digital Age

This book answers how openness became the defining principle of the information age, examining the history of information networks.

Software services are established as a programming concept, but their impact on the overall architecture of enterprise IT and business operations is not well-understood. This has led to problems in deploying SOA, and some disillusionment. The SOA Source Book adds to this a collection of reference material for SOA. It is an invaluable resource for enterprise architects working with SOA.The SOA Source Book will help enterprise architects to use SOA effectively. It explains: What SOA is How to evaluate SOA features in business terms How to model SOA How to use The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF™) for SOA SOA governance This book explains how TOGAF can help to make an Enterprise Architecture. Enterprise Architecture is an approach that can help management to understand this growing complexity.

The economic and political stakes in the current heated debates over “openness” and open standards in the Internet's architecture. Openness is not a given on the Internet. Technical standards—the underlying architecture that enables interoperability among hardware and software from different manufacturers—increasingly control individual freedom and the pace of innovation in technology markets. Heated battles rage over the very definition of “openness” and what constitutes an open standard in information and communication technologies. In Opening Standards, experts from industry, academia, and public policy explore just what is at stake in these controversies, considering both economic and political implications of open standards. The book examines the effect of open standards on innovation, on the relationship between interoperability and public policy (and if government has a responsibility to promote open standards), and on intellectual property rights in standardization—an issue at the heart of current global controversies. Finally, Opening Standards recommends a framework for defining openness in twenty-first-century information infrastructures. Contributors discuss such topics as how to reflect the public interest in the private standards-setting process; why open standards have a beneficial effect on competition and Internet freedom; the effects of intellectual property rights on standards openness; and how to define standard, open standard, and software interoperability.

In light of the increased utilization of information technologies, such as social media and the ‘Internet of Things,’ this book investigates how this digital transformation process creates new challenges and opportunities for political participation, political election campaigns and political regulation of the Internet. Within the context of Western democracies and China, the contributors analyze these challenges and opportunities from three perspectives: the regulatory state, the political use of social media, and through the lens of the public sphere. The first part of the book discusses key challenges for Internet regulation, such as data protection and censorship, while the second addresses the use of social media in political communication and political elections. In turn, the third and last part highlights various opportunities offered by digital media for online civic engagement and protest in the public sphere. Drawing on different academic fields, including political science, communication science, and journalism studies, the contributors raise a number of innovative research questions and provide fascinating theoretical and empirical insights into the topic of digital transformation.

The use of interactive technology in the arts has changed the audience from viewer to participant and in doing so is transforming the nature of experience. From visual and sound art to performance and gaming, the boundaries of what is possible for creation, curating, production and distribution are continually extending. As a consequence, we need to reconsider the way in which these practices are evaluated. Interactive Experience in the Digital Age explores diverse ways of creating and evaluating interactive digital art through the eyes of the practitioners who are embedding evaluation in their creative process as a way of revealing and enhancing their practice. It draws on research methods from other disciplines such as interaction design, human-computer interaction and practice-based research more generally and adapts them to develop new strategies and techniques for how we reflect upon and assess value in the creation and experience of interactive art. With contributions from artists, scientists, curators, entrepreneurs and designers engaged in the creative arts, this book is an invaluable resource for both researchers and practitioners, working in this emerging field.

This edited book focuses on affordances and limitations of e-books for early language and literacy, features and design of e-books for early language and literacy, print versus e-books in early language and literacy development, and uses of and guidelines for how to use e-books in school and home literacy practices. Uniquely, this book includes critical reviews of diverse aspects of e-books (e.g., features) and e-book uses (e.g., independent reading) for early literacy as well as multiple examinations of e-books in home and school contexts using a variety of research methods and/or theoretical frames. The studies of children’s engagement with diverse types of e-books in different social contexts provide readers with a contemporary and comprehensive understanding of this topic. Research has demonstrated that ever-increasing numbers of children use digital devices as part of their daily routine. Yet, despite children’s frequent use of e-books from an early age, there is a limited understanding regarding how those e-books are actually being used at home and school. As more e-books become available, it is important to examine the educational benefits and limitations of different types of e-books for children. So far, studies on the topic have presented inconsistent findings regarding potential benefits and limitations of e-books for early literacy activities (e.g., independent reading, shared reading). The studies in this book aim to fill such gaps in the literature.