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.
Cardinality estimation in numeric on-line databases
Abstract Numeric on-line 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 charging for all on-line IR are toward 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 possibilities of estimating the charges in advance, during the query negotiating phase. The problem of advance charge estimation in NDBs is addressed in this paper. In order to solve this problem, a method for estimating the numbers of data items satisfying the query expressions, i.e. the query cardinalities, is required. In this paper, an approach for advance estimation of query charges is developed and, based on it, a systematic and general method for query cardinality estimation is defined. The approach and the method are based on the well-known relational data model (RDM). The method is adapted to the new application area, user charge estimation in NDBs, and provides several improvements with respect to earlier cardinality estimation methods. Based on the method, several types of user charges can be estimated in advance. Tools based on the method are necessary components of query interfaces to NDBs if non-connect-timebased charging is used. The approach and the method are directly applicable to RDM-based NDBs.
A Novel Approach for Evaluation of Multivariate Individual Bioequivalence
....................................................................................................................... XV PART – I ................................................................................................................................. 1 CHAPTER 1 BIOEQUIVALENCE ................................................................................ 2 1.1 BIOEQUIVALENCE ............................................................................................................ 2 1.2 PHARMACOKINETIC (PK) PARAMETERS .......................................................................... 4 1.3 DESIGN OF BIOEQUIVALENCE STUDIES ............................................................................ 7 CHAPTER 2 ESTIMATION OF BIOEQUIVALENCE ............................................ 10 2.1 TYPES OF BIOEQUIVALENCE MEASURES ....................................................................... 10 2.1.1 Average Bioequivalence ........................................................................................ 10 2.1.2 Population Bioequivalence .................................................................................... 10 2.1.3 Individual Bioequivalence ..................................................................................... 11 2.2 ASSESSMENT OF AVERAGE BIOEQUIVALENCE ............................................................... 12 2.2.1 Confidence Interval Approach ............................................................................... 13 2.2.2 Interval Hypothesis approach ............................................................................... 14 2.3 BASIS FOR POPULATION AND INDIVIDUAL BIOEQUIVALENCE ........................................ 16 2.4 ASSESSMENT OF POPULATION BIOEQUIVALENCE .......................................................... 20 2.5 ASSESSMENT OF INDIVIDUAL BIOEQUIVALENCE ........................................................... 22