Ever since the introduction of the Internet to commercial applications, electronic business has been, and will likely be, leading to numerous evolutionary, if not revolutionary, changes to business in general, and the hospitality industry in particular. These changes have brought about many unprecedented challenges to business managers, and many of these challenges are actually driven by the development of the latest Internet technologies. At present, the topic of electronic business is no longer new. However, the extensive range of applications in different industries, languages, tools, and publications without a worldwide standardized system that publishes data in a way that is easily processed by everyone renders the difficulties for using the web at a large scale. To address this issue, the concept of Semantic Web was recently introduced that attempts to link up different computers so that they can function smoothly for tedious work in retrieving, sharing, and combing information on the web. Since the Semantic Web is a very large engineering approach, scientists and engineers are still working on its solution. The introduction of the book Advances in Electronic Business, Volume II surely makes a contribution to knowledge development in the field, which in turn, leads to the future maturation of the concept.
Authored by experienced scholars in Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America, representing most of the prominent continents in the world, the book comprises 13 chapters. These chapters can be loosely grouped into three parts. The first part consists of the first two chapters in which Chapter I introduces the concept, requirements, language, and technology of the Semantic Web. Chapter II then discusses the main technologies that are fundamental to the Semantic Web and the major features of these technologies. It is, however, interesting to note that the authors of Chapter II made a claim about their unawareness of a related technology.
Chapters III to IX form the second part of the book. These chapters mainly discuss the technological advancements in different aspects from a conceptual point of view. To illustrate, Chapter III presents an approach for good software development practices like modeling and generation, which are essential for developing intelligent Semantic Web services. The authors of Chapter IV then propose a system that enables customer support for users of a Semantic Web environment. After that, Chapter V lists the detailed steps involved in a resource description framework, the language used by the framework, and Jena, which is another framework for building Semantic Web applications. Likewise, Chapter VI presents the technical development of Semantic Web service architecture for learning object repositories. Chapter VII then introduces the technical details of a multi‐agent system for e‐commerce. Subsequently, Chapter VIII proposes a dynamic business process in the peer‐to‐peer Semantic Web. As the last chapter in Part Two, Chapter IX presents an intelligent metasearch engine which can recommend future hyperlink access and paragraphs on the basis of metasearch results.
Part Three of the book comprises the last four chapters, which offer technical details in specific domains of business applications. Specifically, Chapter X proposes a role‐based Chinese Wall model that categories business data into four types of control groups. The model can then be used by auditors to access the data among related enterprises. Similarly, Chapter XI describes the semantics and medical search on the web. Chapter XII then presents a web mining system to find the literature of protein‐to‐protein interaction. The book ends with Chapter XIII which presents a framework with a three‐tier architecture for ontology‐based Semantic Web applications.
With an aim of introducing different levels of concept of the Semantic Web and intelligent web services, the book targets at a wide range of audience including professionals, policy‐makers, academics, researchers, and business IT managers. In addition, readers with different background knowledge are expected to get familiar with the subject by reading the book. Specifically, novice readers can learn the basic knowledge from the first few chapters; whereas experienced readers can appreciate the technical details on implementation from the last few chapters. While such an aim could be true to some business areas, the popularity of this book remains uncertain to readers in the hospitality industry. This uncertainty is largely due to a couple of observable gaps.
While agreeing that the book is good for those readers who have received background training in the field, this technically oriented (instead of business oriented) book is far away from the nature and scope of most, if not all, publications in hospitality management. As such, this book is unlikely to be easily understood by most hospitality practitioners, educators, and students. Besides, although the book is for business applications, most authors are affiliated with engineering or technology departments in universities. The background of these authors, inevitably, renders their write‐up with technical details. More importantly, the included chapters have a very weak, if ever any, linkage to hospitality management.
Generally speaking, the chapters in the book can provide up‐to‐date information in the area. Appropriate literature was often referred that allows readers to be aware of other relevant work in the field. Also, the book has the merits of most edited books in terms of a standardized chapter layout and presentation style. However, minor faults in language use and preparation are found in different places. Also, it is somewhat unexpected that repetitions, like the concept of the Semantic Web, appear in different chapters. To avoid this kind of repetitions, the editors could have provided a clearer outline to authors of different chapters. As well, it is interesting to note that discrepancy of affiliation for one author, which he was affiliated with a university in the chapter but the affiliation changed to a business organization in the section of introduction to authors.
The book can serve as a good reference for researchers and post‐graduate students. The book, however, will disappoint those readers who would like to use it for classroom teaching purpose as it does not have the standard protocols for textbooks like review questions. Still, some chapters can be used as case studies in a graduate course. Last, the book is not inexpensive but considering the amount of technical details that are presented by worldwide scholars, it is not unreasonably priced.
