Healthcare information exchange is an important research topic, which can benefit both healthcare providers and patients. In healthcare data sharing, many cloud-based solutions have been proposed, but the trustworthiness of a third-party cloud service is questionable. Recently, blockchain has been introduced in healthcare record sharing, which does not rely on trusting a third party. However, existing approaches only focus on the records collected from medical examination. They are not efficient in sharing data streams continuously generated from sensors and other monitoring devices. Today, IoT devices have been widely deployed and sensors and mobile applications can monitor patients’ body conditions. The collected data are shared to laboratories and institutions for diagnosis and further study. Moreover, existing approaches are too rigid to efficiently support metadata change. In this paper, an efficient data-sharing scheme is proposed, called MedChain, which combines blockchain, digest chain, and structured P2P network techniques to overcome the above efficiency issues in the existing approaches for sharing both types of healthcare data. Based on MedChain, a session-based healthcare data-sharing scheme is devised, which brings flexibility in data sharing. The evaluation results show that MedChain can achieve higher efficiency and satisfy the security requirements in data sharing.

Virtual commerce applies immersive technology such as augmented reality and virtual reality into e-commerce to shift consumer perception from 2D product catalogs to 3D immersive virtual spaces. In virtual commerce, the alignment of application design paradigms and the factors influencing consumer behavior is paramount to promote purchase of products and services. The question of their relation needs to be answered, together with the possible improvement of application design. This paper used a systematic literature review approach to synthesize research on virtual commerce from both application design and consumer behavior research, considering the promotion of purchase in virtual commerce settings. Throughout the review, influential factors to purchase and preeminent design artifacts were identified. Then, the research gaps were discovered by mapping the design artifacts to the influential factors, which can inspire future research opportunities on the synergy of these two research directions. Moreover, the evolution of virtual commerce research along with multiple directions were discussed, including the suggestion of meta-commerce as a future trend.

To cite this article: Jingzhi Guo (2009) Collaborative conceptualisation: towards a conceptual foundation of interoperable electronic product catalogue system design, Enterprise Information Systems, 3:1, 59-94,The maintenance of semantic consistency between numerous heterogeneous electronic product catalogues (EPC) that are distributed, autonomous, interdependent and emergent on the Internet is an unsolved issue for the existing heterogeneous EPC integration approaches. This article attempts to solve this issue by conceptually designing an interoperable EPC (IEPC) system through a proposed novel collaborative conceptualisation approach. This approach introduces collaboration into the heterogeneous EPC integration. It implies much potential for future e-marketplace research. It theoretically answers why real-world EPCs are so complex, how these complex EPCs can be explained and articulated in a PRODUCT MAP theory for heterogeneous EPC integration, how a semantic consistency maintenance model can be created to satisfy the three heterogeneous EPC integration conditions and implemented by adopting a collaborative integration strategy on a collaborative concept exchange model, and how this collaborative integration strategy can be realised on a collaboration mechanism. This approach has been validated through a theoretical justification and its applicability has been demonstrated in two prototypical e-business applications.

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