What price information
Information today may be envisaged as passing through a chain of hands from its point of origin to its point of use: as information originators and users have become more separate in place or time, various types of intermediaries have grown up to fill the gap between them. Online services involve several of the links in the chain and I want to consider the theme of this meeting, "Concepts of marketing and pricing online services", from the point of view of one of them in particular, namely the search intermediary or library. This is the point at which many of the final recipients of the information, the end-users, currently meet the chain of information provision; it is where much of the marketing of information is done and where the users form their judgement of the utility of the various means of its provision, and it will probably remain so for some time to come in spite of the current interest in by-passing this link and selling to end-users direct. Although the paper's title mentions only the price of information, it is hardly possible to discuss price without considering also value and costs, since the perceived value of the information received will determine in large part what price the market will bear, while the costs of production and delivery will determine the minimum price which one must charge. I am particularly concerned with those fields which may be loosely lumped together as academic and public library information-science, medicine, the humanities and general. Here we have special problems with perceptions of the value of information and thus its marketing and pricing; in this paper I shall briefly consider these and the ways in which closer cooperation between libraries and the providers of the services we are selling may help to solve some of them.
A Straightforward method for Advance estimation of User charges for Information in Numeric Databases
It is generally recognised that numeric databases (NDBs) have become essential in information retrieval (IR). NDBs differ from traditional bibliographic databases (BDBs) with respect to their content, structural complexity, data manipulation capabilities, and the complexity of the user interfaces and user charging schemes. Recent trends in user interfaces and user charging for all online IR are towards charging for the information actually retrieved from the database rather than for the connect time. However, the viability of such charging schemes depends on the user's ability to estimate the charges in advance, during the query negotiation phase. This paper presents a systematic and general method for estimating user charges for retrieved information in advance, in the context of NDBs based on the relational data model (RDM). The method accepts relational algebra (RA) queries of any complexity, estimates the sizes of their results, and charges for them on the basis of the descriptions of the original dat...
Space Qualification Testing of a Shape Memory Alloy Deployable CubeSat Antenna
Abstract : Increasingly capable CubeSat missions require antenna with improved Radio Frequency performance over the traditional CubeSat antennas. Deployable quadrifilar helical antennas (QHA) enable an acceptable stowing volume and deploy to provide increased gain and bandwidth over traditional patch and dipole antennas. Extensive ground testing is required to ensure the antenna is space qualified and to characterize the antenna deployment in the space environment. AFIT requires a QHA to perform a future CubeSat geolocation mission and contracted Helical Communication Technologies (HCT) to design and manufacture a Shape Memory Alloy (SMA) L-band deployable QHA. Vibration, thermal vacuum, laser vibrometer, and Voltage Standing Wave Ratio (VSWR) experiments were conducted on the HCT antenna to verify the hardware in a simulated launch environment and to characterize the SMA deployment in the simulated space environment.The HCT QHA successfully passed all required NASA General Environmental Verification Standards space qualification testing. Several anomalies experienced by the QHA encourage a redesign. The deployed antenna length varied from 250-290 mm and future RF testing is required to determine if the antenna geometry variations are significant enough to impact the geolocation mission.This research documents the test results for a QHA deployable CubeSat antenna testing and aids the development of CONOPS for the future AFIT CubeSat mission utilizing the HCT QHAs.