Within a short period, the Internet and World Wide Web have become ubiquitous, surpassing all other technological developments in our history. They've also grown rapidly in their scope and extent of use, significantly affecting all aspects of our lives. Industries such as manufacturing, travel and hospitality, banking, education, and government are Web-enabled to improve and enhance their operations. E-commerce has expanded quickly, cutting across national boundaries. Even traditional legacy information and database systems have migrated to the Web. Advances in wireless technologies and Web-enabled appliances are triggering a new wave of mobile Web applications. As a result, we increasingly depend on a range of Web applications. Now that many of us rely on Web based systems and applications, they need to be reliable and perform well. To build these systems and applications, Web developers need a sound methodology, a disciplined and repeatable process, better development tools, and a set of good guidelines. The emerging field of Web engineering fulfils these needs. It uses scientific, engineering, and management principles and systematic approaches to successfully develop, deploy, and maintain high-quality Web systems and applications. It aims to bring the current chaos in Web based system development under control, minimize risks, and enhance Web site maintainability and quality.

Smallholder farmers produce over 70% of the world’s food needs. Yet, the socioeconomic conditions of the smallholder farmers are substandard. One of the primary reasons for this unpropitious situation is that they generate modest income by selling their harvest due to the lack of trusted buyers and organized markets. This research explores how technology can enable the trust to reduce transaction-related risks, empowering unknown parties to transact. Blockchain technology has the potential of mitigating transaction-related risks and promoting trust with a tamper-proof history of transactions and automatic execution of smart contracts. Based on blockchain technology to promote trust, this research has discovered a novel approach for smallholder farmers to conduct exchanges by generating social capital as an individual and using that social capital as collateral for financial exchanges when establishing contracts. This approach empowers farmers to trade smart futures contracts on behalf of the expected harvest at a better rate to receive some cash in advance to be used in the cultivation process to produce a high-quality harvest that attracts better rates. It also enables them to perform aggregated marketing with enhanced market linkages that, in turn, assist in increasing margins made by the farmer.

Chatbots or conversational agents are computer programs, which interact with users using natural language through artificial intelligence in a way that the user thinks he is having dialogue with a human. One of the main limit of a chatbot technology is associated to the construction of its local knowledge base. A conventional chatbot knowledge base is typically hand constructed, which is a very time-consuming process and may take years to train a chatbot in a particular field of expertise. This work presented in this paper extends the knowledge base of a conventional chatbot beyond its local knowledge base to external knowledge source Wikipedia. This has been achieved by using Media Wiki API to retrieve information from Wikipedia when the chatbot's local knowledge base does not contain the answer to user query. To make the conversation with chatbot more meaningful with regards to the user's previous chat sessions, a user specific session ability has been added to the chatbot architecture. An open source AIML web based chatbot has been modified and programmed for the use in health informatics domain. The chatbot has been named VDMS - Virtual Diabetes Management System. It is intended to be used by the general community and diabetic patients for diabetes education and management.