An empirical study of e-service quality and user satisfaction of public service centers in China

This article describes how as part of the reform of the administrative system of China, most local governments have set up public service centers; meanwhile, ICT (Information and Communication Technology) has been commonly applied to make e-services more convenient, efficient and transparent. However, the existing studies in the Chinese context are mostly qualitative and the relationship between service quality and citizen satisfaction has not been tested. This article adopted the D&M model to develop an e-service quality model and tested the impact of service quality on citizen satisfaction. A survey was conducted and 364 valid questionnaires were analyzed. The results showed that the data fit the model well. Most of the hypotheses formulated in this article was proven. Additionally, an important finding was that the impact of service quality on specific satisfaction is stronger than that of information quality and system quality, which indicates that face-to-face services cannot simply be substituted by electronic systems. Both the theoretical and practical implications of the findings were discussed

Ontology Engineering The “What’s”, “Why’s”, and “How’s” of Data Exchange

In a challenging financial climate, there is a growing impetus for businesses to use existing process data to support more intelligent decision making. For large-scale complex systems such as railways, electricity grids, and gas distribution networks, this often means combining information from numerous different condition monitoring systems; however, given the vast amounts of data produced every day and the frequently incompatible data models used to represent it, is it possible to be sure that the information generated is being used correctly? This paper provides an introduction to the field of Ontology, an emerging technology that allows the exact “meaning” of an item of data to be described in a way that can be interpreted by computers. Through this retention of meaning, it becomes possible for computers to perform simple reasoning operations, inferring new information about a system from the existing facts, and enabling exciting new Semantic Web technologies.</p