• Journal of the Society of Disaster Information
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.556-569
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• 2015

With about 75% of the population of Korea criticizing the government's disaster policy and a failure to respond to large-scale emergency like the Sewol ferry sinking means that there is a deep distrust in the government. In order to prevent dreadful disasters such as the Sewol ferry sinking, it is important to secure a prime time with respect to disaster safety. Improving crisis management skills and managerial role of police officers who are in close proximity to the people is necessary for the success of disaster management. With disaster management as one of the most essential missions of the police, as a part of a national crisis management, a step by step strengthening of the disaster safety management system of the police is necessary, as below. First, at the prevention phase, law enforcement officers were not injected into for profit large-scale assemblies or events, but in the future the involvement, injection should be based on the level of potential risk, rather than profitability. In the past and now, the priortiy was the priority was on traffic flow, traffic communication, however, the paradigm of traffic policy should be changed to a safety-centered policy. To prevent large-scale accidents, police investigators should root out improper routines and illegal construction subcontracting. The police (intelligence) should strengthen efforts to collect intelligence under the subject of "safety". Second, with respect to the preparatory phase, on a survey of police officers, the result showed that 72% of police officers responded that safety management was not related to the job descriptions of the police. This, along with other results, shows that the awareness of disaster safety must be adopted by, or rather changed in the police urgently. The training in disaster safety education should be strengthened. A network of experts (private, administrative, and police) in safety management should be established to take advantage of private resources with regard to crisis situtions. Third, with respect to the response phase, for rapid first responses to occur, a unified communication network should be established, and a real-time video information network should be adopted by the police and installed in the police situation room. Fourth, during the recovery phase, recovery teams should be injected, added and operated to minimize secondary damage.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.59-87
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• 2014

In MIS field, the researches on payment services are focused on adoption factors of payment service using behavior theories such as TRA(Theory of Reasoned Action), TAM(Technology Acceptance Model), and TPB (Theory of Planned Behavior). The previous researches presented various adoption factors according to types of payment service, nations, culture and so on even though adoption factors of identical payment service were presented differently by researchers. The payment service industry relatively has strong path dependency to the existing payment methods so that the research results on the identical payment service are different due to payment culture of nation. This paper aims to suggest a successful adoption factor of noble payment service regardless of nation's culture and characteristics of payment and prove it. In previous researches, common adoption factors of payment service are convenience, ease of use, security, convenience, speed etc. But real cases prove the fact that adoption factors that the previous researches present are not always critical to success to penetrate a market. For example, PayByPhone, NFC based parking payment service, successfully has penetrated to early market and grown. In contrast, Google Wallet service failed to be adopted to users despite NFC based payment method which provides convenience, security, ease of use. As shown in upper case, there remains an unexplained aspect. Therefore, the present research question emerged from the question: "What is the more essential and fundamental factor that should takes precedence over factors such as provides convenience, security, ease of use for successful penetration to market". With these cases, this paper analyzes four cases predicted on the following hypothesis and demonstrates it. "To successfully penetrate a market and sustainably grow, new payment service should find non-customer of the existing payment service and provide noble payment method so that they can use payment method". We give plausible explanations for the hypothesis using multiple case studies. Diners club, Danal, PayPal, Square were selected as a typical and successful cases in each category of payment service. The discussion on cases is primarily non-customer analysis that noble payment service targets on to find the most crucial factor in the early market, we does not attempt to consider factors for business growth. We clarified three-tier non-customer of the payment method that new payment service targets on and elaborated how new payment service satisfy them. In case of credit card, this payment service target first tier of non-customer who can't pay for because they don't have any cash temporarily but they have regular income. So credit card provides an opportunity which they can do economic activities by delaying the date of payment. In a result of wireless phone payment's case study, this service targets on second of non-customer who can't use online payment because they concern about security or have to take a complex process and learn how to use online payment method. Therefore, wireless phone payment provides very convenient payment method. Especially, it made group of young pay for a little money without a credit card. Case study result of PayPal, online payment service, shows that it targets on second tier of non-customer who reject to use online payment service because of concern about sensitive information leaks such as passwords and credit card details. Accordingly, PayPal service allows users to pay online without a provision of sensitive information. Final Square case result, Mobile POS -based payment service, also shows that it targets on second tier of non-customer who can't individually transact offline because of cash's shortness. Hence, Square provides dongle which function as POS by putting dongle in earphone terminal. As a result, four cases made non-customer their customer so that they could penetrate early market and had been extended their market share. Consequently, all cases supported the hypothesis and it is highly probable according to 'analytic generation' that case study methodology suggests. We present for judging the quality of research designs the following. Construct validity, internal validity, external validity, reliability are common to all social science methods, these have been summarized in numerous textbooks(Yin, 2014). In case study methodology, these also have served as a framework for assessing a large group of case studies (Gibbert, Ruigrok & Wicki, 2008). Construct validity is to identify correct operational measures for the concepts being studied. To satisfy construct validity, we use multiple sources of evidence such as the academic journals, magazine and articles etc. Internal validity is to seek to establish a causal relationship, whereby certain conditions are believed to lead to other conditions, as distinguished from spurious relationships. To satisfy internal validity, we do explanation building through four cases analysis. External validity is to define the domain to which a study's findings can be generalized. To satisfy this, replication logic in multiple case studies is used. Reliability is to demonstrate that the operations of a study -such as the data collection procedures- can be repeated, with the same results. To satisfy this, we use case study protocol. In Korea, the competition among stakeholders over mobile payment industry is intensifying. Not only main three Telecom Companies but also Smartphone companies and service provider like KakaoTalk announced that they would enter into mobile payment industry. Mobile payment industry is getting competitive. But it doesn't still have momentum effect notwithstanding positive presumptions that will grow very fast. Mobile payment services are categorized into various technology based payment service such as IC mobile card and Application payment service of cloud based, NFC, sound wave, BLE(Bluetooth Low Energy), Biometric recognition technology etc. Especially, mobile payment service is discontinuous innovations that users should change their behavior and noble infrastructure should be installed. These require users to learn how to use it and cause infra-installation cost to shopkeepers. Additionally, payment industry has the strong path dependency. In spite of these obstacles, mobile payment service which should provide dramatically improved value as a products and service of discontinuous innovations is focusing on convenience and security, convenience and so on. We suggest the following to success mobile payment service. First, non-customers of the existing payment service need to be identified. Second, needs of them should be taken. Then, noble payment service provides non-customer who can't pay by the previous payment method to payment method. In conclusion, mobile payment service can create new market and will result in extension of payment market.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.53-77
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• 2015

Mobile commerce provides a convenient shopping experience in which users can buy products without the constraints of time and space. Mobile commerce has already set off a mega trend in Korea. The market size is estimated at approximately 15 trillion won (KRW) for 2015, thus far. In the Korean market, social commerce and open market are key components. Social commerce has an overwhelming open market in terms of the number of users in the Korean mobile commerce market. From the point of view of the industry, quick market entry, and content curation are considered to be the major success factors, reflecting the rapid growth of social commerce in the market. However, academics' empirical research and analysis to prove the success rate of social commerce is still insufficient. Henceforward, it is to be expected that social commerce and the open market in the Korean mobile commerce will compete intensively. So it is important to conduct an empirical analysis to prove the differences in user experience between social commerce and open market. This paper is an exploratory study that shows a comparative analysis of social commerce and the open market regarding user experience, which is based on the mobile users' reviews. Firstly, this study includes a collection of approximately 10,000 user reviews of social commerce and open market listed Google play. A collection of mobile user reviews were classified into topics, such as perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use through LDA topic modeling. Then, a sentimental analysis and co-occurrence analysis on the topics of perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use was conducted. The study's results demonstrated that social commerce users have a more positive experience in terms of service usefulness and convenience versus open market in the mobile commerce market. Social commerce has provided positive user experiences to mobile users in terms of service areas, like 'delivery,' 'coupon,' and 'discount,' while open market has been faced with user complaints in terms of technical problems and inconveniences like 'login error,' 'view details,' and 'stoppage.' This result has shown that social commerce has a good performance in terms of user service experience, since the aggressive marketing campaign conducted and there have been investments in building logistics infrastructure. However, the open market still has mobile optimization problems, since the open market in mobile commerce still has not resolved user complaints and inconveniences from technical problems. This study presents an exploratory research method used to analyze user experience by utilizing an empirical approach to user reviews. In contrast to previous studies, which conducted surveys to analyze user experience, this study was conducted by using empirical analysis that incorporates user reviews for reflecting users' vivid and actual experiences. Specifically, by using an LDA topic model and TAM this study presents its methodology, which shows an analysis of user reviews that are effective due to the method of dividing user reviews into service areas and technical areas from a new perspective. The methodology of this study has not only proven the differences in user experience between social commerce and open market, but also has provided a deep understanding of user experience in Korean mobile commerce. In addition, the results of this study have important implications on social commerce and open market by proving that user insights can be utilized in establishing competitive and groundbreaking strategies in the market. The limitations and research direction for follow-up studies are as follows. In a follow-up study, it will be required to design a more elaborate technique of the text analysis. This study could not clearly refine the user reviews, even though the ones online have inherent typos and mistakes. This study has proven that the user reviews are an invaluable source to analyze user experience. The methodology of this study can be expected to further expand comparative research of services using user reviews. Even at this moment, users around the world are posting their reviews about service experiences after using the mobile game, commerce, and messenger applications.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.83-105
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• 2016

Measuring an individual's subjective wellbeing in an accurate, unobtrusive, and cost-effective manner is a core success factor of the wellbeing support system, which is a type of medical IT service. However, measurements with a self-report questionnaire and wearable sensors are cost-intensive and obtrusive when the wellbeing support system should be running in real-time, despite being very accurate. Recently, reasoning the state of subjective wellbeing with conventional sentiment analysis and unstructured data has been proposed as an alternative to resolve the drawbacks of the self-report questionnaire and wearable sensors. However, this approach does not consider contextual polarity, which results in lower measurement accuracy. Moreover, there is no sentimental word net or ontology for the subjective wellbeing area. Hence, this paper proposes a method to extract keywords and their contextual polarity representing the subjective wellbeing state from the unstructured text in online websites in order to improve the reasoning accuracy of the sentiment analysis. The proposed method is as follows. First, a set of general sentimental words is proposed. SentiWordNet was adopted; this is the most widely used dictionary and contains about 100,000 words such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs with polarities from -1.0 (extremely negative) to 1.0 (extremely positive). Second, corpora on subjective wellbeing (SWB corpora) were obtained by crawling online text. A survey was conducted to prepare a learning dataset that includes an individual's opinion and the level of self-report wellness, such as stress and depression. The participants were asked to respond with their feelings about online news on two topics. Next, three data sources were extracted from the SWB corpora: demographic information, psychographic information, and the structural characteristics of the text (e.g., the number of words used in the text, simple statistics on the special characters used). These were considered to adjust the level of a specific SWB. Finally, a set of reasoning rules was generated for each wellbeing factor to estimate the SWB of an individual based on the text written by the individual. The experimental results suggested that using contextual polarity for each SWB factor (e.g., stress, depression) significantly improved the estimation accuracy compared to conventional sentiment analysis methods incorporating SentiWordNet. Even though literature is available on Korean sentiment analysis, such studies only used only a limited set of sentimental words. Due to the small number of words, many sentences are overlooked and ignored when estimating the level of sentiment. However, the proposed method can identify multiple sentiment-neutral words as sentiment words in the context of a specific SWB factor. The results also suggest that a specific type of senti-word dictionary containing contextual polarity needs to be constructed along with a dictionary based on common sense such as SenticNet. These efforts will enrich and enlarge the application area of sentic computing. The study is helpful to practitioners and managers of wellness services in that a couple of characteristics of unstructured text have been identified for improving SWB. Consistent with the literature, the results showed that the gender and age affect the SWB state when the individual is exposed to an identical queue from the online text. In addition, the length of the textual response and usage pattern of special characters were found to indicate the individual's SWB. These imply that better SWB measurement should involve collecting the textual structure and the individual's demographic conditions. In the future, the proposed method should be improved by automated identification of the contextual polarity in order to enlarge the vocabulary in a cost-effective manner.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.119-138
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• 2016

Since the Industrial Revolution, which made the mass production and mass distribution of standardized goods possible, machine-made (manufactured) products have accounted for the majority of the market. However, in recent years, the phenomenon of purchasing even more expensive handmade products has become a noticeable trend as consumers have started to acknowledge the value of handmade products, such as the craftsman's commitment, belief in their quality and scarcity, and the sense of self-esteem from having them,. Consumer interest in these handmade products has shown explosive growth and has been coupled with the recent development of three-dimensional (3D) printing technologies. Etsy.com is the world's largest online handmade platform. It is no different from any other online platform; it provides an online market where buyers and sellers virtually meet to share information and transact business. However, Etsy.com is different in that shops within this platform only deal with handmade products in a variety of categories, ranging from jewelry to toys. Since its establishment in 2005, despite being limited to handmade products, Etsy.com has enjoyed rapid growth in membership, transaction volume, and revenue. Most recently in April 2015, it raised funds through an initial public offering (IPO) of more than 1.8 billion USD, which demonstrates the huge potential of online handmade platforms. After the success of Etsy.com, various types of online handmade platforms such as Handmade at Amazon, ArtFire, DaWanda, and Craft is ART have emerged and are now competing with each other, at the same time, which has increased the size of the market. According to Deloitte's 2015 holiday survey on which types of gifts the respondents plan to buy during the holiday season, about 16% of U.S. consumers chose "homemade or craft items (e.g., Etsy purchase)," which was the same rate as those for the computer game and shoes categories. This indicates that consumer interests in online handmade platforms will continue to rise in the future. However, this high interest in the market for handmade products and their platforms has not yet led to academic research. Most extant studies have only focused on machine-made products and intelligent services for them. This indicates a lack of studies on handmade products and their intelligent services on virtual platforms. Therefore, this study used signaling theory and prior research on the effects of sellers' characteristics on their performance (e.g., total sales and price premiums) in the buyer-seller relationship to identify the key influencing e-Image factors (e.g., reputation, size, information sharing, and length of relationship). Then, their impacts on the performance of shops within the online handmade platform were empirically examined; the dataset was collected from Etsy.com through the application of web harvesting technology. The results from the structural equation modeling revealed that the reputation, size, and information sharing have significant effects on the total sales, while the reputation and length of relationship influence price premiums. This study extended the online platform research into online handmade platform research by identifying key influencing e-Image factors on within-platform shop's total sales and price premiums based on signaling theory and then performed a statistical investigation. These findings are expected to be a stepping stone for future studies on intelligent online handmade services as well as handmade products themselves. Furthermore, the findings of the study provide online handmade platform operators with practical guidelines on how to implement intelligent online handmade services. They should also help shop managers build their marketing strategies in a more specific and effective manner by suggesting key influencing e-Image factors. The results of this study should contribute to the vitalization of intelligent online handmade services by providing clues on how to maximize within-platform shops' total sales and price premiums.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.19-47
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• 2015

In this era of knowledge economy, a variety of virtual communities are proliferating for the purpose of knowledge creation and utilization. Since the voluntary contributions of members are the essential source of knowledge, member turnover can have significant implications on the survival and success of virtual communities. However, there is a dearth of research on the effect of membership turnover and even the method of measurement for membership turnover is left unclear in virtual communities. In a traditional context, membership turnover is calculated as the ratio of the number of departing members to the average number of members for a given time period. In virtual communities, while the influx of newcomers can be clearly measured, the magnitude of departure is elusive since explicit withdrawals are seldom executed. In addition, there doesn't exist a common way to determine the average number of community members who return and contribute intermittently at will. This study initially examines the limitations in applying the concept of traditional turnover to virtual communities, and proposes five membership fluidity measures based on a preliminary analysis of editing behaviors of 2,978 featured articles in English Wikipedia. Subsequently, this work investigates the relationships between three selected membership fluidity measures and group collaboration performance, reflecting a moderating effect dependent on work characteristic. We obtained the following results: First, membership turnover relates to collaboration efficiency in a right-shortened U-shaped manner, with a moderating effect from work characteristic; given the same turnover rate, the promotion likelihood for a more professional task is lower than that for a less professional task, and the likelihood difference diminishes as the turnover rate increases. Second, contribution period relates to collaboration efficiency in a left-shortened U-shaped manner, with a moderating effect from work characteristic; the marginal performance change per unit change of contribution period is greater for a less professional task. Third, the number of new participants per month relates to collaboration efficiency in a left-shortened reversed U-shaped manner, for which the moderating effect from work characteristic appears to be insignificant.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.131-146
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• 2011

It is becoming more essential than ever for office professionals to become competent in information collection/gathering and problem solving in today's global business society. In particular, office professionals do not only assist simple chores but are also forced to make decisions as quickly and efficiently as possible in problematic situations that can end in either profit or loss to their company. Since office professionals rely heavily on their tacit knowledge to solve problems that arise in everyday business situations, it is truly helpful and efficient to refer to similar business cases from the past and share or reuse such previous business knowledge for better performance results. Case-based reasoning(CBR) is a problem-solving method which utilizes previous similar cases to solve problems. Through CBR, the closest case to the current business situation can be searched and retrieved from the case or knowledge base and can be referred to for a new solution. This reduces the time and resources needed and increase success probability. The main purpose of this study is to design a system called COKRS(Case-based reasoning Office Knowledge Recommender System) and develop a prototype for it. COKRS manages cases and their meta data, accepts key words from the user and searches the casebase for the most similar past case to the input keyword, and communicates with users to collect information about the quality of the case provided and continuously apply the information to update values on the similarity table. Core concepts like system architecture, definition of a case, meta database, similarity table have been introduced, and also an algorithm to retrieve all similar cases from past work history has also been proposed. In this research, a case is best defined as a work experience in office administration. However, defining a case in office administration was not an easy task in reality. We surveyed 10 office professionals in order to get an idea of how to define a case in office administration and found out that in most cases any type of office work is to be recorded digitally and/or non-digitally. Therefore, we have defined a record or document case as for COKRS. Similarity table was composed of items of the result of job analysis for office professionals conducted in a previous research. Values between items of the similarity table were initially set to those from researchers' experiences and literature review. The results of this study could also be utilized in other areas of business for knowledge sharing wherever it is necessary and beneficial to share and learn from past experiences. We expect this research to be a reference for researchers and developers who are in this area or interested in office knowledge recommendation system based on CBR. Focus group interview(FGI) was conducted with ten administrative assistants carefully selected from various areas of business. They were given a chance to try out COKRS in an actual work setting and make some suggestions for future improvement. FGI has identified the user-interface for saving and searching cases for keywords as the most positive aspect of COKRS, and has identified the most urgently needed improvement as transforming tacit knowledge and knowhow into recorded documents more efficiently. Also, the focus group has mentioned that it is essential to secure enough support, encouragement, and reward from the company and promote positive attitude and atmosphere for knowledge sharing for everybody's benefit in the company.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.105-130
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• 2008

Consumers of e-learning market differ from those of other markets in that they are replaced in a specific time scale. For example, e-learning contents aimed at highschool senior students cannot be consumed by a specific consumer over the designated period of time. Hence e-learning service providers need to attract new groups of students every year. Due to lack of information on products designed for continuously emerging consumers, the consumers face difficulties in making rational decisions in a short time period. Increased uncertainty of product purchase leads customers to herding behaviors to obtain information of the product from others and imitate them. Taking into consideration of these features of e-learning market, this study will focus on the online herding behavior in purchasing e-learning contents. There is no definite concept for e-learning. However, it is being discussed in a wide range of perspectives from educational engineering to management to e-business etc. Based upon the existing studies, we identify two main view-points regarding e-learning. The first defines e-learning as a concept that includes existing terminologies, such as CBT (Computer Based Training), WBT (Web Based Training), and IBT (Internet Based Training). In this view, e-learning utilizes IT in order to support professors and a part of or entire education systems. In the second perspective, e-learning is defined as the usage of Internet technology to deliver diverse intelligence and achievement enhancing solutions. In other words, only the educations that are done through the Internet and network can be classified as e-learning. We take the second definition of e-learning for our working definition. The main goal of this study is to investigate what factors affect consumer intention to purchase e-learning contents and to identify the differential impact of the factors between consumers with purchase experience and those without the experience. To accomplish the goal of this study, it focuses on herding behavior and perceived usefulness as antecedents to behavioral intention. The proposed research model in the study extends the Technology Acceptance Model by adding herding behavior and usability to take into account the unique characteristics of e-learning content market and e-learning systems use, respectively. The current study also includes consumer experience with e-learning content purchase because the previous experience is believed to affect purchasing intention when consumers buy experience goods or services. Previous studies on e-learning did not consider the characteristics of e-learning contents market and the differential impact of consumer experience on the relationship between the antecedents and behavioral intention, which is the target of this study. This study employs a survey method to empirically test the proposed research model. A survey questionnaire was developed and distributed to 629 informants. 528 responses were collected, which consist of potential customer group (n = 133) and experienced customer group (n = 395). The data were analyzed using PLS method, a structural equation modeling method. Overall, both herding behavior and perceived usefulness influence consumer intention to purchase e-learning contents. In detail, in the case of potential customer group, herding behavior has stronger effect on purchase intention than does perceived usefulness. However, in the case of shopping-experienced customer group, perceived usefulness has stronger effect than does herding behavior. In sum, the results of the analysis show that with regard to purchasing experience, perceived usefulness and herding behavior had differential effects upon the purchase of e-learning contents. As a follow-up analysis, the interaction effects of the number of purchase transaction and herding behavior/perceived usefulness on purchase intention were investigated. The results show that there are no interaction effects. This study contributes to the literature in a couple of ways. From a theoretical perspective, this study examined and showed evidence that the characteristics of e-learning market such as continuous renewal of consumers and thus high uncertainty and individual experiences are important factors to be considered when the purchase intention of e-learning content is studied. This study can be used as a basis for future studies on e-learning success. From a practical perspective, this study provides several important implications on what types of marketing strategies e-learning companies need to build. The bottom lines of these strategies include target group attraction, word-of-mouth management, enhancement of web site usability quality, etc. The limitations of this study are also discussed for future studies.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.85-97
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• 2010

Internet communities are a typical space for knowledge creation and use on the Internet as people discuss their common interests within the internet communities. When we define 'Knowledge Communities' as internet communities that are related to knowledge creation and use, they are categorized into 4 different types such as 'Search Engine,' 'Open Communities,' 'Specialty Communities,' and 'Activity Communities.' Each type of knowledge community does not remain the same, for example. Rather, it changes with time and is also affected by the external business environment. Therefore, it is critical to develop processes for practical use of such changeable knowledge communities. Yet there is little research regarding a strategic framework for knowledge communities as a source of knowledge creation and use. The purposes of this study are (1) to find factors that can affect knowledge creation and use for each type of knowledge community and (2) to develop a strategic framework for practical use of the knowledge communities. Based on previous research, we found 7 factors that have considerable impacts on knowledge creation and use. They were 'Fitness,' 'Reliability,' 'Systemicity,' 'Richness,' 'Similarity,' 'Feedback,' and 'Understanding.' We created 30 different questions from each type of knowledge community. The questions included common sense, IT, business and hobbies, and were uniformly selected from various knowledge communities. Instead of using survey, we used these questions to ask users of the 4 representative web sites such as Google from Search Engine, NAVER Knowledge iN from Open Communities, SLRClub from Specialty Communities, and Wikipedia from Activity Communities. These 4 representative web sites were selected based on popularity (i.e., the 4 most popular sites in Korea). They were also among the 4 most frequently mentioned sitesin previous research. The answers of the 30 knowledge questions were collected and evaluated by the 11 IT experts who have been working for IT companies more than 3 years. When evaluating, the 11 experts used the above 7 knowledge factors as criteria. Using a stepwise linear regression for the evaluation of the 7 knowledge factors, we found that each factors affects differently knowledge creation and use for each type of knowledge community. The results of the stepwise linear regression analysis showed the relationship between 'Understanding' and other knowledge factors. The relationship was different regarding the type of knowledge community. The results indicated that 'Understanding' was significantly related to 'Reliability' at 'Search Engine type', to 'Fitness' at 'Open Community type', to 'Reliability' and 'Similarity' at 'Specialty Community type', and to 'Richness' and 'Similarity' at 'Activity Community type'. A strategic framework was created from the results of this study and such framework can be useful for knowledge communities that are not stable with time. For the success of knowledge community, the results of this study suggest that it is essential to ensure there are factors that can influence knowledge communities. It is also vital to reinforce each factor has its unique influence on related knowledge community. Thus, these changeable knowledge communities should be transformed into an adequate type with proper business strategies and objectives. They also should be progressed into a type that covers varioustypes of knowledge communities. For example, DCInside started from a small specialty community focusing on digital camera hardware and camerawork and then was transformed to an open community focusing on social issues through well-known photo galleries. NAVER started from a typical search engine and now covers an open community and a special community through additional web services such as NAVER knowledge iN, NAVER Cafe, and NAVER Blog. NAVER is currently competing withan activity community such as Wikipedia through the NAVER encyclopedia that provides similar services with NAVER encyclopedia's users as Wikipedia does. Finally, the results of this study provide meaningfully practical guidance for practitioners in that which type of knowledge community is most appropriate to the fluctuated business environment as knowledge community itself evolves with time.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.163-179
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• 2010

Recentlythe concept of fast fashion is drawing attention as customer needs are diversified and supply lead time is getting shorter in fashion industry. It is emphasized as one of the critical success factors in the fashion industry how quickly and efficiently to satisfy the customer needs as the competition has intensified. Because the fast fashion is inherently susceptible to trend, it is very important for fashion retailers to make quick decisions regarding items to launch, quantity based on demand prediction, and the time to respond. Also the planning decisions must be executed through the business processes of procurement, production, and logistics in real time. In order to adapt to this trend, the fashion industry urgently needs supports from intelligent quick response(QR) system. However, the traditional functions of QR systems have not been able to completely satisfy such demands of the fast fashion industry. This paper proposes an intelligent quick response system for the fast fashion(IQRS-FF). Presented are models for QR process, QR principles and execution, and QR quantity and timing computation. IQRS-FF models support the decision makers by providing useful information with automated and rule-based algorithms. If the predefined conditions of a rule are satisfied, the actions defined in the rule are automatically taken or informed to the decision makers. In IQRS-FF, QRdecisions are made in two stages: pre-season and in-season. In pre-season, firstly master demand prediction is performed based on the macro level analysis such as local and global economy, fashion trends and competitors. The prediction proceeds to the master production and procurement planning. Checking availability and delivery of materials for production, decision makers must make reservations or request procurements. For the outsourcing materials, they must check the availability and capacity of partners. By the master plans, the performance of the QR during the in-season is greatly enhanced and the decision to select the QR items is made fully considering the availability of materials in warehouse as well as partners' capacity. During in-season, the decision makers must find the right time to QR as the actual sales occur in stores. Then they are to decide items to QRbased not only on the qualitative criteria such as opinions from sales persons but also on the quantitative criteria such as sales volume, the recent sales trend, inventory level, the remaining period, the forecast for the remaining period, and competitors' performance. To calculate QR quantity in IQRS-FF, two calculation methods are designed: QR Index based calculation and attribute similarity based calculation using demographic cluster. In the early period of a new season, the attribute similarity based QR amount calculation is better used because there are not enough historical sales data. By analyzing sales trends of the categories or items that have similar attributes, QR quantity can be computed. On the other hand, in case of having enough information to analyze the sales trends or forecasting, the QR Index based calculation method can be used. Having defined the models for decision making for QR, we design KPIs(Key Performance Indicators) to test the reliability of the models in critical decision makings: the difference of sales volumebetween QR items and non-QR items; the accuracy rate of QR the lead-time spent on QR decision-making. To verify the effectiveness and practicality of the proposed models, a case study has been performed for a representative fashion company which recently developed and launched the IQRS-FF. The case study shows that the average sales rateof QR items increased by 15%, the differences in sales rate between QR items and non-QR items increased by 10%, the QR accuracy was 70%, the lead time for QR dramatically decreased from 120 hours to 8 hours.