E-commerce has increased substantially, as e-retailers engage with consumers online. Users require more than products and quality service; they also expect a good user experience. User experience is affected by branding, ...

The Digital Doorway (DD) project provides computing infrastructure in impoverished communities in South Africa. DD terminals offer opportunities for unassisted- and peerassisted learning of basic computer skills, and ...

Objects can be said to be structured when their representation also contains their parts. While OWL in general can describe structured objects, description graphs are a recent, decidable extension to OWL which support ...

Ontology, an explicit specification of a shared conceptualisation, captures knowledge about a specific domain of interest. The realisation of ontologies, revolutionised the way data stored in relational databases is ...

Network research experiments have traditionally been conducted in emulated or simulated environments. Emulators are frequently deployed on physical networks. Network simulators provide a self-contained and simple environment ...

This dissertation investigates high-level decision making for agents that are both goal and utility driven. We develop a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) planner which is an extension of an agent ...

The specification of enterprise information systems using formal specification languages enables the formal verification of these systems. Reasoning about the properties of a formal specification is a tedious task that ...

Several technologies and languages exist for the development and implementation of distributed systems. Furthermore, several models for teaching computer programming and teaching programming in a distance-based educational ...

The primary contributions to the area of electronic business integration, propounded by this thesis, are (in no particular order):  A novel examination of global Business-to-Business (B2B) interoperability in terms ...

Web-based learning should move away from static transmission of instruction to dynamic pages for effective interactive learning. Furthermore, automated assessment of learning should move beyond rigid quizzes or multiple-choice ...