We use ICT in a wide variety of ways, often without understanding what happens behind the user interface. We’ve become accustomed to the seamless operation of cloud services, such as data centers, Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems, search engines and communication networks without understanding what is needed to make them work. Increasingly, tasks are carried out through a collaboration between edge computing (on the user devices) and cloud services (both data storage and more complex processing). Several key factors are driving the expansion of ICT usage. First, digitalization is creating a growing demand for ICT services, which, in turn, fuels increased investment in ICT infrastructure. Second, the complexity of the services we require is expanding, leading to the development of larger service platforms and more intricate applications. This growing complexity directly contributes to an increase in electricity consumption needed to power these services. As electricity consumption rises, so does the environmental impact, making the ICT sector a significant source of emissions. The purpose of this paper is to shed light on electricity consumption within the ICT sector. While it’s easy for us to track the electricity usage of our personal devices, the resources required to power the services behind the network interface often remain invisible to the average ICT user.

As they have been for decades, databases are a key component in various types of business applications. Nowadays, modern databases also include features that support the construction of applications based on artificial intelligence. The starting point of this paper is the questions of what are the typical use cases in which a database and generative artificial intelligence work together, what database features are used in these applications, and what other technologies the applications rely on. The results contribute to one of our practice-oriented research projects, in which we build an environment that supports AI experiments for participating companies. As input, we use open online learning materials provided by three database vendors. The databases we selected for review are all non-relational, representing three different genres, and are the most popular representatives of their genre. For each training program of the vendors, we will examine the structure and scope of the program, the courses on generative AI included in the program, and the use cases and technologies related to generative AI presented in them. Finally, we will prepare a summary of the use cases and technologies found.

The article focuses on one aspect of artificial intelligence – Generative AI (GenAI) – which is expected to offer significant opportunities in different areas of business, industry, and society. GenAI is the current state of the decades-long development of artificial intelligence (AI), and many companies are currently looking for ways to benefit from this market-changing technology. The use of GenAI in business practices is topical among companies and organizations, and decision-makers across the globe are considering the future potential of GenAI and large language models (LLM) for organizations and businesses. The aim of this paper is to examine the utilization of artificial intelligence in business operations and industry, emphasizing both the opportunities offered by GenAI as well as the challenges related to its usage. Additionally, the paper strives to determine whether the phenomenon is real or merely hype, as well as addressing its so-called revolutionary status. The topic is approached through a light literature review and discussion on the findings of two studies carried out in Finnish companies related to GenAI utilization.

Computers were originally developed for executing complex calculations fast and effectively. The intelligence of computer was based on arithmetic capabilities. This has been the mainstream in the development of computers until now. In the middle of 1950s a new application area, Artificial Intelligence (AI), was introduced by researchers. They had interest to use computers to solve problems in the way intelligent beings do. The architecture, which supported calculations, were conquered to perform tasks associated with intelligence beings, to execute inference operations and to simulate human sense. Artificial intelligence has had several reincarnation cycles; it has reappeared in different manifestations since this research area became interesting for the researchers. All the time a lot of discussion about intelligence of these systems has been going on – are the AI based systems and robots intelligent, what is the difference of human and machine intelligence, etc. Abilities related to intelligence cover ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills, as well as ability to learn. AI provides different manifestations to the term “intelligence”: the human intelligence is a wide variety of different types of intelligence, as well as the meaning of artificial intelligence has varied over time. In our paper we will look to this term, especially to provide means for comparing human and artificial intelligence and have a look to the learning capability related to it.

Data (conceptual, data, information, knowledge) modelling is still the work of an artisan, i.e. an art in the best case, made by humans, because of the need for human intelligence. Data modelling is an essential part of Information System (IS) design, specifying how data is implemented as part of an IS. The principles of data modelling follow the evolution of IS development paradigms, and these in turn follow the progress of technological changes in computing. Although technology has changed a lot during the decades of commercial use of computers – since the early 1950s to now, close to 70 years – data modelling is still based on the same basic principles as decades ago. Or is it really so? Finding the answer to this question was the main motivation to start writing this paper. Since the future is more interesting than the past, we set our research problem to be “What are the challenges for data modelling in the future?”. The reason for this is that we see some significant changes in the future in the data modelling sector which we wanted to examine. However, the future is a continuum of the past. The future cannot be fully understood without understanding the past. Humans also tend to forget the details of the past. Even the most remarkable innovations from the past have become part of the new normal. Consequently, at the beginning of our paper we look shortly at the progress of data modelling during the era of commercial computing. Our focus is on the recent past and we look at the technological changes that have been of key importance in data modelling in the role of triggers and enablers. To find the answer to our research question, we retrieved some recent studies handling the future of data modelling and analyse the challenges found in these sources. The paper is concluded by some future paradigms. In general, the big changes seem to be the growing importance of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) as its fuel. AI not only conducts algorithmic rule-based routines, it has learning capability, which makes it more intelligent and adaptable, and able to compete with human intelligence, even in data management tasks.

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Humankind faces a most crucial mission; we must endeavour, on a global scale, to restore and improve our natural and social environments. This is a big challenge for global information systems development and for their modelling. In this paper, we discuss on different aspects of conceptual modelling in global environmental context. The paper is the summary of the panel session “The Future of Conceptual Modelling” in the 29th International Conference on Information Modelling and Knowledge Bases.

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Modelling is an essential part of information systems development. Models are used for communication between interest groups and inside development teams. Models are also used for transferring baseline artefacts between development phases. Models are mainly developed by humans, which represent certain cultures - national, enterprise, professional, team, project etc. Because of that we claim that models, as well as many other information systems related artefacts are culture dependent. The models are born in certain context and these must be also interpreted by taking the original context into account. In our earlier studies we have analysed the effect of culture in information systems development: culture related aspects in general level, in information search and interaction and in web information systems. We focus now on modelling. Because of that we shortly answer to the question “How cultures differ from each other”. This reviews and synthesis generally accepted frameworks for cultural analysis. In addition we shortly open the results of our earlier studies. Because modelling is a human activity, as well as information systems are used by humans, we integrate the use context into information systems development. The findings of culture analysis are transferred to modelling practices via our framework that defines model as an instrument transferring elements of its development context to the models – we discuss the roles of normal models, deep models and modelling matrix. Finally we will concentrate on the problems of cross-cultural modelling using selected national cultures as an example.

Enormous quantities of data, collected and stored in large numerous data repositories, go unused or underused today, simply because people are unable to visualize the quantities and relationships involved. This huge amount of data has far exceeded our human ability for comprehension without powerful tools. Information visualization and visual data mining can help to deal with the flood of information. We can take advantage of visualization techniques to discover data relationships that are otherwise not easily observable by looking at the “raw data”. Visualization can add significant value when trying to understand not only the raw data available in large software archives, but also the results of data mining. These data are valuable especially in software maintenance activities, understanding software evolution and the socio-technical aspects of software development. Data mining and visualization are focal enablers for information recognition and knowledge discovery from any amount of data repositories. This paper present the results of a survey, which reviews some of the most common visual data mining (VDM) techniques and their usage in the software engineering field. The results indicate what kinds of aspects of the software engineering process are studied using VDM methods, and also the most common VDM methods used in the software engineering context.

Website design is often performed either by technology-biased people or by artisans and thus results either in a domination of technological solutions or fancy artistic solutions. Observing however which websites evolve successfully over a dozen of years we realise that these are those that properly match their layout and playout to the expectations and especially the cultures of their users. A website may be characterised by six dimensions: presentation, content, functionality, stories to be played, context and user intentions and needs. The last two dimensions heavily depend on the culture of the website customer. Culture studies developed models on passivity resp. multi-tasking or on general pattern of thinking or feeling or acting of users. In this paper we study the desiderata of low and high context of culture for website design and compare them to the Lewis and Hofstede model.

A clean environment is often taken for granted, but when a river or a lake becomes polluted, it might be hard for the general public to verify the condition. A simple visualization tool for checking the condition of water could help to inform the public and help to increase environmental awareness. With the emergence of Open Data and other openly available data sources, it is possible to create new and innovative applications. In this paper we present a web-based tool for reviewing the quality of water by applying the River Heavy Metal Evaluation Index (rHMEI) method together with open data on water quality in Finland.

The importance of information in our daily life is increasing rapidly. Simultaneously the availability of information from different sources has grown exponentially. The progress in data oriented context has grown from traditional approach based on queries to databases to the beneficial use of wide variety of openly available, quite often also non-structured data sources. The complexity of data needs has also increased and solutions are based on combined multi-query results. The development has also taken us towards global context, in which data is used over geographical and cultural borders. Information search is a communication oriented task, in which the cultures of users and meet the culture related aspects of data repositories. A mismatch between the users' national culture based expectations to the behavior of global information services (information system and their user interfaces) is the source of a variety of problems. In our paper we analyse the characteristics of information search and the cultural aspects guiding the behavior of the users of information systems. These two approaches are merged in the form of query-answer profiles. The purpose of the paper is to find guidelines possible to generalize and apply by the developers and users for survival in global information system context.

Attaching any kind of clue – event, location, person, tag or keyword – to a photo eases the process of searching. Often the problem is that the user feels that it is difficult to think of good tags or that the tagging process is too tedious or cumbersome. At the same time, users use social media daily, and write about topics they feel are important and that they are actively interested in. This paper presents a method for extracting metadata (tag suggestions) from social media profiles and illustrates the use of the tags for photo tagging by means of a web-based photo application.

Globalisation has a strong impact on information systems both from a development and usage point of view. Development is done by geographically distributed teams, with team members representing different cultures. In addition, the information systems are targeted at widening markets to get new clients and business - either as they are or as localized variations. In the case of traditional information systems, the needs related to globalisation are more or less manageable, because the clients are at least to some extent known, as well as their needs and preferences. Cloud technology and cloud-based solutions are replacing traditional information systems at an accelerating speed. In some cases, the question is only one change to an execution platform, but more often also opening up the information system usage to a “faceless” mass of users over the Internet – the information system (IS) becomes an SaaS-based WIS (Web Information System). In addition to SaaS-based solutions, the WIS category covers a wide variety of web services available in a more or less open manner; as a consequence the ability to react to the needs of a multi-cultural set of users causes new challenges to the developers and service implementation. Our paper initiates discussion on the challenges related to a WIS in a multi-cultural context. The complexity is structured by recognition of six concerns (viewpoints), which are handled in an interrelated manner. The foundation is built by analysis of cultural differences, which are used to clarify and explain the culture-based differences in information system structure and usage. Culture-related aspects of storyboards and database schemas are dealt with and evidence is derived from selected existing information systems.

Conceptual modelling education is often a part of any Informatics and Computer Science curricula but is also included in other study programs where conceptual modelling knowledge is needed. Conceptual modelling is well defined and numerous sources are available in existing literature. The steps to develop conceptual models are easy to learn and support is possible also via different tools, based on a theoretical background, mostly through the Peter Chen approach. In general, such an educational approach can be described as a standard conceptual modelling education. But, unfortunately, standard conceptual modeling education does not inform culturally-aware developers of conceptual models. The confidence and assurance that cross cultural issues and cultural awareness will be considered in the phase of conceptual modelling could be reached on one side by upgrading the conceptual modeling approach with a cultural point of view, as well as by introducing cultural issues into conceptual modelling education. Students need to be aware of basic cultural issues and concepts and their influence on conceptual modeling. In the long term, the mentioned content should become part of standard conceptual modeling education. This means changes in the content of curricula as well as a change in thinking by students and teachers.

The paper develops an approach to information system adaptation supporting diversity and heterogeneity of users. The user perspective is handled from culture point of view. Cultures are layered and this structure can be used for starting with national cultures and deriving stereotypes. Culture is recognised as a multidimensional structure, in which national culture provides a basement for the behavioural variations of individuals in personal level. For information system development this layering covers three different perspectives: cultural stereotypes and user models, organisational models and technology models. We thus may develop a coherent information system perspective that supports adaptivity in multicultural information system applications.

For successful collaboration, global communication systems are of critical importance, especially those which are enabled by information and communication technology as partners in the process. It seems that partners do not need to know each other personally, but it is enough that they have a good technical support in computerized collaborative tools and software. This also means that collaboration (cooperation) does not depend on geographical location and can be spread all around the world. Establishing a virtual environment means establishing surroundings in which partners have to work and communicate. From a technical point of view, such an environment seems to be quite easy to organise and manage. However, difficulties can be expected in the collaboration of people, even when cooperation is based on a common business culture. In spite of belong to the same business culture, participants can belong to different language and culture groups, which can have an important influence on collaboration of all involved parties. While the language differences can be overcome with the use of English as a lingua franca, we do not have a Culture as a culture franca. This means that attention should be paid to intercultural collaboration in a virtual environment. Education in cultural studies, cultural awareness and appropriate tools are all necessary. In this paper, we will point out all the important components for international collaboration in a virtual environment, from definitions of interculture and collaboration up to methodologies, that supports work in a virtual environment and virtual centres itself.

The trend of globalization has been seen for several decades. Wider markets, the vicinity of the client, cheaper working force and wider IT-professional pools are driving software organizations to offshore software product development. As the result, the software engineering (SE) teams are distributed and multicultural. Differences in cultural backgrounds cause various issues which often stay unrecognized and unsolved for years in global organizations. The operation of software developing organizations is divided into SE processes, described in international standards such as ISO/IEC 15504. SE processes are impacted by cultural factors in global environment because software development relies heavily on the communication with the client and among the team members. The aim of this paper is to propose a tool for cultural sensitivity assessment in SE processes. Cultural sensitivity assessment model (CSAM) helps to identify cultural factors that impact the outcomes of the SE processes. The results of the cultural sensitivity identification in SE processes can be further benefited in cultural training, strategy planning or even software process improvement (SPI).

Specification of collaboration has neglected over a long period although collaboration is one of main conceptions in computer science and computer engineering. We distinguish between collaborations among systems and socio-technical collaboration. Database research has succeeded in developing approaches for collaboration among database systems that incorporate conceptual specification and allow to reason on systems at a far higher abstraction level. Conceptual modelling of socio-technical collaborating systems is however an open research issue. With the advent of web information systems systems became naturally socio-technical and collaborating. Therefore, we need a techniques for conceptual description of collaboration. Collaboration modelling may be based on models for communication, models for coordination, and models for cooperation. In socio-technical systems users work within their local environment and collaborate within the global world. Therefore, users inject their culture and their specific behaviour into collaboration. Users use information, communication, cooperation and coordination services. These services must be highly flexible and adaptable to the needs of users, to the circumstances and contexts of these users, and to the technical infrastructures used.

Exceptions are considered to be unusual states that can but must not be taken primarily into account. They form exclusions, represent cases to which a rule does not apply, form specific states that are not going to be handled at least by the current system, or might represent legal objections against the typical state. Exceptions are currently considered to be a sign of poor culture, wrong implementation, bugs in the code, bad understanding of the application domain area, wrong deployment of technology, or poor education of people. This understanding is completely different from the understanding and treatment of exceptions in real life.

This paper includes five contributions on the topic of multimedia information systems for social, cross-cultural and environmental computing. Approaches, models, and methods for Web Semantization, Cross-cultural Image Computing, Information Modelling and Data Mining, Mobile Information Systems for Ubiquitous Society, and Multimedia Systems for Cross-cultural and Environmental Computing are introduced and discussed. This paper is based on the contributions presented in the panel discussion of EJC 2012 Conference.

Website usage continues to increase, while the number of servers increases, their total energy consumption is growing. Meanwhile, server utilization is consistently very low. Servers can be combined to effectively increase the utilization rate and hence the energy consumption even while reducing maintenance costs. This requires, however, that the knowledge of usage of services is updated and the information is sufficient. Usage of services will change as a consequence of users' habits and as a result of internal changes of the service. Therefore, usage of the service has to be capable of being continuously analyzed and to be able to express the result in an easily understandable manner. In the literature, there are several ways to analyze usage of web service. So far, none of these has been found suitable for continuous and automated analysis, in a way that could produce results for programmatic use in the future. We present an automated method for modeling web service usage. The model can help increase knowledge of website usage. As a result, valid actions can be taken in capacity planning and to consequently reduce the energy consumption. At the same time, it will also ensure that service quality remains satisfactory in relation to real demand.

Present computer science and informatics have to produce IT solutions that are user friendly and in general global appropriate while we are nowadays much more connected to each other as in the past. We are living in multicultural and multilingual societies where the intercultural dialog and cultural awareness are more and more important. With increased mobility, small societies are more multicultural and international, while in the past mostly only big societies with a lot of immigrants have been described as multicultural and multilingual. Internationalization and mobility pushed us to take care about the global conceptual modeling. This entire means that our partners in the modeling process (users and customers) are/could coming from different organizational, cultural and language environments. Consecutive, this can influence theirs way of understanding conceptual modeling, as well as methods, expectations, results and other activities in the process. Even more, this can influence also their understanding of expert topics independent to the fact that we have to do with the common, everyday used topics like counting and banking, known all around the world.

Knowledge management has been a hot research issues for decades and resulted in many proposals and some systems that have been supporting information exchange in companies or societies. They failed however to become knowledge systems. With the advent of the internet the knowledge web is going to replace knowledge management. It creates its own challenges but take advantage of all web, information systems and software technology.

In our paper we discuss advanced viewpoints to “Kansei” and cross-cultural computing, to context modelling, context-sensitive information systems, and cross-cultural software engineering. Culture is embodied in how people interact with other individuals and with their environment. It is a way of life formed under specific historical, natural and social conditions. Culture can be considered as one example of context. A computational method, a computer system, or an application is context-sensitive if it includes context-based functions and if it uses context to provide relevant information and services to the user, where relevancy depends on the user's impressions and the situation at hand. Because of globalization, cultural competence together with context sensitive information systems and their development has become an important dimension for success in today's international business and research.

Classical software development methodologies take architectural issues as granted or pre-determined. They thus neglect the impact decisions for architecture have within the development process. This omission is applicable as long as we are considering monolithic systems. It cannot however been kept whenever we move to distributed systems. Web information systems pay far more attention to users support and thus require sophisticated layout and playout systems. These systems go beyond what has been known for presentation systems.

The internet and web applications have changed business and human life. Nowadays everybody is used to obtain data through the internet. Most applications are still Web 1.0 applications. Web 2.0 community collaboration and annotated data on the basis of Web 3.0 technologies supports new businesses and applications. The quality dimension of the web is however one of the main challenges. Knowledge systems target at high-quality data on safe grounds, with a good reference to established science and technology and with data adaptation to user's needs and demands. Knowledge system can be build based on existing and novel technologies. This paper discusses the challenges, two solutions and the fundamentals of knowledge system environments.

Virtual communities rely primarily on ICT to connect their members to work together, and to share knowledge and practices. The importance of virtual collaborative work is increasing not only because of its economical and environmental benefits, but also due to its flexibility for establishing dynamically new cross-organizational and cross-cultural innovative teams. Virtual collaborative spaces should support their joint activities. In order to design and realize such spaces, an understanding of the tasks to be carried out by the virtual community is necessary, as well as an understanding of the related processes, contexts, and knowledge. In our paper, we introduce a reference model of a Cross-Cultural Cyber Space (CCS) for context-based knowledge creation and sharing between the members of the cross-cultural collaborative community. We also describe the prototype implementation of the CCS, a 3D cross-cultural art museum system.

In this paper we are proposing a view of modelling which is based on a process-ontological modelling. Firstly we will consider different kinds of definitions for processes, and how these influence thinking in software engineering. Secondly, we define the basic modelling situation and different ways of its using. Thirdly, we will describe the problem of a common process connected with a mechanical view of processes, which we are compared with an alternative view based on process-ontological view. Lastly, we will introduce a Process-Ontological Model, (POM), according to which everything can be seen as processes. We are proposing that by means of process-ontological modelling we are able make a wider and more flexible view to modelling situations.

Web information systems (WIS) augment classical information systems by modern Web technologies. They require at the same time a careful development and support for the interaction or story spaces beside the classical support for the working space of users. These dimensions complicate the system development process. This paper shows how classical advanced methodologies can be carefully enhanced. We evaluated the Co-Design approach to information systems development according to the ISO/IEC 15504 Framework for Process Assessment (SPICE) and derived the potential and deficiencies of this approach. This evaluation has been used for a managed Co-Design methodology. Since WIS constantly change and evolve the development process never ends. We develop as a solution an optimization procedure and a runtime environment for the Co-Design approach that allows to cope with such changes, with evolution and extension of WIS and that demonstrates the new system facilities whenever a change is mastered.

Utilization of global information resources as a part of risk management is insufficient. The authorities are maintaining information systems mainly for their own purposes, without access to high quality public information sources in Internet and without interoperability between systems of different authorities. Beneficial use of all available information resources would provide an opportunity to create knowledge based on different pieces of information. However, powerful distributed knowledge management, mining of the information items, analysing the quality of them, is needed to create new information to be utilized. The distributed operations needs support of complex network architectures, models supporting mutual understanding over the cultures and language borders, and ability to recognize the context and adapt the results to the new context. This paper opens discussion from different viewpoints to the topic of global risk management. Architectural solutions supporting interoperability, quality of data in wide networks, ubiquity and mobility as well as time dimension of the information space are covered.