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 methodology for user charge estimation in numeric online databanks. Part II
Recent studies on user charging information retrieval services emphasize charging on the basis of the information retneved from the databases or its retneval costs as being more justified and appropnate as bases for charging than the tradi tional connect-time. When these charging bases are applied in numeric online databanks, the charges vary over a very broad range, depending on factors which the users cannot know or manage. Therefore the users cannot estimate their charges in advance, prior to query execution. This has many undesirable practical consequences for information retrieval and informa tion seeking. In order to avoid such consequences and to achieve full advantage of such charging bases, user charge estimation tools which automatically estimate the charges on the basis of user query statements must be provided in the query systems to databanks. A novel and systematic methodol ogy for user charge estimation, to be applied by the tools, is reviewed. The methodology has been developed in the context of the relational data model. By applying the methodology, user charges for the information retrieved and its retneval costs for relational algebra queries can be estimated generally, accu rately and conveniently. In addition to the charge estimates, the methodology provides rich descriptions of the query results that essentially support query formulation. Therefore the user can concentrate on query formulation with a clear idea about the query results and his charges in mind. The architecture of the methodology is such that the methodology can be extended to further charging bases in information retrieval (e.g. data communication costs). In Part I of the article, the state of the art and trends in the development and use of databanks and in the charging principles of information retneval were reviewed. The methodology is now descnbed and special attention is paid to the design of user interfaces of the tools based on the methodology.
ETL Tools in Enterprise Data Warehouse
A B S T R A C T An enterprise data warehouse (EDW) also known as Data warehouse (DW), is a system used for reporting and data analysis. DWs are central repositories of integrated data from one or more disparate sources. ExtractionTransformation-Loading (ETL) processes are responsible for all the operations taking place at the warehouse. These processes are performed by specialized tools known as ETL tools or also called as Data Integration tools. The ETL tools are available in the market either as closed source software or as open source software. An ETL tool from both these categories has their advantages and suffers from some limitations as well. The main objective of this paper is to highlight the importance of the data integration tools or also known as ETL tools in business intelligence environment.