Healthcare information exchange is an important research topic, which can benefit both healthcare providers and patients. In healthcare data sharing, many cloud-based solutions have been proposed, but the trustworthiness of a third-party cloud service is questionable. Recently, blockchain has been introduced in healthcare record sharing, which does not rely on trusting a third party. However, existing approaches only focus on the records collected from medical examination. They are not efficient in sharing data streams continuously generated from sensors and other monitoring devices. Today, IoT devices have been widely deployed and sensors and mobile applications can monitor patients’ body conditions. The collected data are shared to laboratories and institutions for diagnosis and further study. Moreover, existing approaches are too rigid to efficiently support metadata change. In this paper, an efficient data-sharing scheme is proposed, called MedChain, which combines blockchain, digest chain, and structured P2P network techniques to overcome the above efficiency issues in the existing approaches for sharing both types of healthcare data. Based on MedChain, a session-based healthcare data-sharing scheme is devised, which brings flexibility in data sharing. The evaluation results show that MedChain can achieve higher efficiency and satisfy the security requirements in data sharing.

Virtual commerce applies immersive technology such as augmented reality and virtual reality into e-commerce to shift consumer perception from 2D product catalogs to 3D immersive virtual spaces. In virtual commerce, the alignment of application design paradigms and the factors influencing consumer behavior is paramount to promote purchase of products and services. The question of their relation needs to be answered, together with the possible improvement of application design. This paper used a systematic literature review approach to synthesize research on virtual commerce from both application design and consumer behavior research, considering the promotion of purchase in virtual commerce settings. Throughout the review, influential factors to purchase and preeminent design artifacts were identified. Then, the research gaps were discovered by mapping the design artifacts to the influential factors, which can inspire future research opportunities on the synergy of these two research directions. Moreover, the evolution of virtual commerce research along with multiple directions were discussed, including the suggestion of meta-commerce as a future trend.

Heterogeneous device services generated by various devices in different contexts prevent users from efficiently and correctly consuming device services. This seriously hinders the development of Internet of Things. This paper addresses the problems appearing in device discovery and device interaction. It devises a user interoperability framework (UIF) to enable device users to interoperate with heterogeneous devices of different contexts with consistent syntax and semantics. In this framework, a new separation strategy is provided; a device representation method for real, common, and virtual devices is devised; and a device transformability model is proposed to guarantee the proper transformation of device syntax and semantics. To demonstrate the correctness of UIF, a UIF prototype is implemented and several experiment methods are compared to determine which one should be adopted as semantic relatedness computing tools in device discovery for device users and in common device publishing for device providers.

For the multilingual semantic interoperations in cross-organizational enterprise systems and e-commerce systems, semantic consistency is a research issue that has not been well resolved. This paper contributes to improving multilingual semantic interoperation by proposing a concept-connected near synonym (NSG) framework for concept disambiguation. NSG framework provides a vocabulary preprocessing process of collaborative vocabulary editing, which further ensures semantically consistent vocabulary for building semantically consistent business processes and documents between context-different information systems. The vocabulary preprocessing offered by NSG automates the process of finding potential near synonym sets and identifying collaboratively editable near synonym sets. The realization of NSG framework includes a probability model that computes concept values between concepts based on a newly introduced semantic relatedness method-SRCT. In this paper, SRCT-based methods are implemented and compared with some existing semantic relatedness methods. Experiments have shown that SRCT-based methods outperform the existing methods. This paper has made an improvement on the existing methods of semantic relatedness and reduces the collaboration cost of collaborative vocabulary editing.

An electronic marketplace (e-marketplace) is a common business information space populated with many entities of different system types. Each of them has its own context of how to process activities. This leads to heterogeneous e-marketplace activities, which are difficult to make interoperable and inferred from one entity to another. This study solves this problem by proposing a concept of separation strategy and implementing it through providing a semantic inference engine with a novel inference algorithm. The solution, called the RuleXPM approach, enables one to semantically infer a next e-marketplace activity across multiple contexts/domains. Experiments show that the cross-context/cross-domain semantic inference is achievable. This paper is an understanding of many aspects related to heterogeneous activity inference.

The maintenance of semantic consistency between numerous heterogeneous electronic product catalogues (EPC) that are distributed, autonomous, interdependent and emergent on the Internet is an unsolved issue for the existing heterogeneous EPC integration approaches. This article attempts to solve this issue by conceptually designing an interoperable EPC (IEPC) system through a proposed novel collaborative conceptualisation approach. This approach introduces collaboration into the heterogeneous EPC integration. It implies much potential for future e-marketplace research. It theoretically answers why real-world EPCs are so complex, how these complex EPCs can be explained and articulated in a product map theory for heterogeneous EPC integration, how a semantic consistency maintenance model can be created to satisfy the three heterogeneous EPC integration conditions and implemented by adopting a collaborative integration strategy on a collaborative concept exchange model, and how this collaborative integration strategy can be realised on a collaboration mechanism. This approach has been validated through a theoretical justification and its applicability has been demonstrated in two prototypical e-business applications.