An ontology is a formal description of concepts and relationships that can exist for a community of human and/or machine agents. The notion of ontologies is crucial for the purpose of enabling knowledge sharing and reuse. The Handbook on Ontologies provides a comprehensive overview of the current status and future prospectives of the field of ontologies considering ontology languages, ontology engineering methods, example ontologies, infrastructures and technologies for ontologies, and how to bring this all into ontology-based infrastructures and applications that are among the best of their kind. The field of ontologies has tremendously developed and grown in the five years since the first edition of the "Handbook on Ontologies". Therefore, its revision includes 21 completely new chapters as well as a major re-working of 15 chapters transferred to this second edition.

Handbook on Ontologies

Digital marketing: A framework, review and research agenda

The rise of motivational information systems: A review of gamification research

We study a contest with multiple (not necessarily equal) prizes. Contestants have private information about an ability parameter that affects their costs of bidding. The contestant with the highest bid wins the first prize, the contestant with the second-highest bid wins the second prize, and so on until all the prizes are allocated. All contestants incur their respective costs of bidding. The contest's designer maximizes the expected sum of bids. Our main results are: 1) We display bidding equlibria for any number of contestants having linear, convex or concave cost functions, and for any distribution of abilities. 2) If the cost functions are linear or concave, then, no matter what the distribution of abilities is, it is optimal for the designer to allocate the entire prize sum to a single ''first'' prize. 3) We give a necessary and sufficient conditions ensuring that several prizes are optimal if contestants have a convex cost function.

The Optimal Allocation of Prizes in Contests

Over the past 15 years, digital media platforms have revolutionized marketing, offering new ways to reach, inform, engage, sell to, learn about, and provide service to customers. As a means of taking stock of academic work’s ability to contribute to this revolution, this article tracks the changes in scholarly researchers’ perspectives on three major digital, social media, and mobile (DSMM) marketing themes from 2000 to 2015. The authors first use keyword counts from the premier general marketing journals to gain a macro-level view of the shifting importance of various DSMM topics since 2000. They then identify key themes emerging in five-year time frames during this period: (1) DSMM as a facilitator of individual expression, (2) DSMM as decision support tool, and (3) DSMM as a market intelligence source. In both academic research to date and corresponding practitioner discussion, there is much to appreciate. However, there are also several shortcomings of extant research that have limited its rel...

A Thematic Exploration of Digital, Social Media, and Mobile Marketing: Research Evolution from 2000 to 2015 and an Agenda for Future Inquiry

As online games grow in importance as an electronic commerce application, researchers and practitioners increasingly believe that understanding online game player behavior is critical to the success of online game vendors. In an attempt to gain new insights into the determinants of behavioral intention to play online games, we propose a theoretical model that augments the theory of reasoned action (TRA) with two new constructs, trust and enjoyment. Within the model framework, we investigate the impact of trust and enjoyment on behavioral intention as well as on behavioral attitude. Our proposed model is tested by using questionnaire responses of 253 online game players. As hypothesized, attitude, enjoyment, and subjective norms predict intention, and enjoyment significantly affects attitude. The results also show that trust affects intention only indirectly through attitude. The paper contributes by highlighting the roles of trust and enjoyment in the online gaming context. Keywords: enjoyment, online games, TRA, trust 1. Introduction In the past decade, the business of online games has grown rapidly due to advances in personal computing and the remarkable penetration of the high-speed Internet. DFC Intelligence (2006) estimates that the total revenue of the online game industry will grow from $3.4 billion in 2005 to over $13 billion in 2011. The market research firm also estimates that the number of global online game players will increase from 124 million in 2005 to 376 million by 2009. The rapid growth of online gaming businesses calls for an investigation to discover what key factors motivate players to play games online. Little empirical study, however, has been conducted on the determinants of player behavior. Online games are played through the Internet (Hilton 2006). Unlike traditional PC or console games where one or two players play a game on a personal computer, online games allow many players around the world to play together on a game server via the Internet. With a monthly subscription fee of about $15, players can now play online almost all popular PC titles such as Battlefield, Counter-Strike, World of Warcraft, and Call of Duty. Meanwhile, a new breed of online game titles such as Star Wars Galaxies, EverQuest, and Dark Age of Camelot, known as massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs), are available through the Internet only. MMOGs allow hundreds of thousands of players to simultaneously interact in a virtual game world. Online gaming websites, such as Yahoo! Games, MSN Zone, and Pogo, attract tens of millions of registered players and have 150,000 to 200,000 simultaneous users at any given time (DFC Intelligence 2004). Players' intention to play online games is of considerable interest because creators, sponsors, and operators of online games can benefit greatly from improved understandings of the driving factors behind players' intention. Understanding player intention is also an important first step for industry vendors in their quest to motivate players to visit online game websites more often and to develop customer loyalty. Moreover, other segments of the online entertainment industry, such as IPTV (Internet Protocol Television) and Podcast, may also benefit from improved understandings of player intention in online gaming settings. The purpose of this study is to develop and empirically test a theoretical model of the determinants of intention to play online games. The proposed theoretical model integrates trust and enjoyment into the theory of reasoned action (TRA). TRA suggests that behavioral intention is a function of an individual's attitude toward the behavior and the individual's subjective norms. To adapt TRA to the online gaming context, we extend it with two important constructs: trust and enjoyment. Prior research suggests that trust is the foundation of e-commerce (Fukuyama 1995; Keen 1999; Morgan and Hunt 1994; Williamson 1985), and we argue the same holds for online gaming because, like other e-commerce applications, it involves providing services to consumers via Internet. …

http://web.csulb.edu/journals/jecr/issues/20072/paper2.pdf

The Effects of Trust and Enjoyment on Intention to Play Online Games

Gamification is the application of game-based thinking to everyday tasks to make them more engaging. Based on this concept, gamified systems are being developed in applications such as health, training, social media, and e-commerce. The excitement and anticipation around gamification reflect a fundamental shift in the way we interact with technology systems. Hence, from a research perspective, gamification offers fresh opportunities to design and research newer technology environments that have a blend of utilitarian and hedonic characteristics. But currently there is not much clarity on the concept of gamification, the different ways gamification can affect outcomes, and how this new type of information system could be researched and designed. We address these issues in this commentary by explicating the concept of gamification and distinguishing it from other game-based designs. We then present a framework for design and research on gamified information systems, and identify theoretical bases that could inform this research. We conclude with sample questions that offer directions for future research on this promising and fun topic.

Towards Meaningful Engagement: A Framework for Design and Research of Gamified Information Systems

Because digital games are fun, engaging, and popular, organizations are attempting to integrate them within organizational activities as serious components, with the anticipation that they can improve employees' motivation and performance But in order to do so and to obtain the intended outcomes, it is necessary to first obtain an understanding of how different digital game designs impact players' behaviors and emotional responses Hence, in this study, we address one key element of popular game designs: competition Using extant research on tournaments and intrinsic motivation, we model competitive games as a skill-based tournament and conduct an experimental study to understand player behaviors and emotional responses under different competition conditions When players compete with players of similar skill levels, they apply more effort as indicated by more games played and longer duration of play But when players compete with players of lower skill levels, they report higher levels of enjoyment and lower levels of arousal after game-playing We discuss the implications for organizations seeking to introduce games premised on competition and provide a framework to guide information system researchers to embark on a study of games

/pdf/digital-games-and-beyond-what-happens-when-players-compete-4zmdtgzi9e.pdf

Digital games and beyond: what happens when players compete?

This paper investigates how friendship relationships act as pipes, prisms, and herding signals in a large online, peer-to-peer (P2P) lending site. By analyzing decisions of lenders, we find that friends of the borrower, especially close offline friends, act as financial pipes by lending money to the borrower. On the other hand, the prism effect of friends' endorsements via bidding on a loan negatively affects subsequent bids by third parties. However, when offline friends of a potential lender, especially close friends, place a bid, a relational herding effect occurs as potential lenders are likely to follow their offline friends with a bid.

Friendships in online peer-to-peer lending: pipes, prisms, and relational herding

Gamification, an emerging idea for using game design elements and principles to make everyday tasks more engaging, is permeating many different types of information systems. Excitement surrounding gamification results from its many potential organizational benefits. However, few research and design guidelines exist regarding gamified information systems. We therefore write this commentary to call upon information systems scholars to investigate the design and use of gamified information systems from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and theories, including behavioral economics, psychology, social psychology, information systems, etc. We first explicate the idea of gamified information systems, provide real-world examples of successful and unsuccessful systems, and, based on a synthesis of the available literature, present a taxonomy of gamification design elements. We then develop a framework for research and design: its main theme is to create meaningful engagement for users; that is, gamified information systems should be designed to address the dual goals of instrumental and experiential outcomes. Using this framework, we develop a set of design principles and research questions, using a running case to illustrate some of our ideas. We conclude with a summary of opportunities for IS researchers to extend our knowledge of gamified information systems, and, at the same time, advance existing theories.

De Liu

Papers

The Effects of Trust and Enjoyment on Intention to Play Online Games

Towards Meaningful Engagement: A Framework for Design and Research of Gamified Information Systems

Digital games and beyond: what happens when players compete?

Friendships in online peer-to-peer lending: pipes, prisms, and relational herding

Toward meaningful engagement: a framework for design and research of gamified information systems