UniBench: A Benchmark for Multi-model Database Management Systems

As digitalization in factories continues, companies increasingly want to establish their production as a cohesive digital representation. One method to achieve this over the lifecycle of an asset is the digital twin (DT). It contains model descriptions of products and processes and incorporates asset-specific information. Due to the variety of data generated, efficient handling poses a challenge. Previously used databases often follow a relational approach, which is not suitable for storing extensive, heterogeneous, unstructured data. NoSQL, which can basically handle this data, however, only supports one data model (e.g., graphs), resulting in multiple databases for each data model. We propose the use of multi-model databases (MMD) for digital twins which can store the whole range of data models needed within one single system. Since MMDs found only little application in this context, advantages over the aforementioned approaches for their use in digital twins are shown. The MMD allows to connect all generated data consistently which thereby enables an efficient cross-data model query. The development and application of a digital twin in an MMD is demonstrated by an industrial quality inspection process. In accordance with the DT, all necessary data, such as inspection equipment, plans and processes, are represented in a suitable data model inside the MMD. Finally, the results of the application of MMD in DTs are discussed and aspects for future work are pointed out. KeywordsDigital twinMulti-model databaseQuality inspectionData modelingDigital productionVirtual production

Despite its innovative and avant-garde reputation, the luxury industry initially began showing a very low commitment to new online marketing tools and it held a conservative approach to selling when compared to other sectors. Nowadays, the context has dramatically changed and luxury brands are approaching with an increasing interest social networks as well as the online selling. This research aims to clarify the current strategic approaches of the players in the different luxury markets towards the social commerce phenomenon, from both a theoretical and an empirical point of view. The purpose is to test a framework that can be used to classify luxury companies’ strategies regarding social media adoptions based on actual theories on social media. Four strategies related to the social media adoption by luxury brands have been identified: the Social brand ambassadors strategy class (low promotional content percentage and low social commerce score) includes those brands that use social media for entertainment and user engagement; the Social showcases strategy (high promotional content percentage and low social commerce score) includes those brands that use their social accounts as online catalogues; the Social infotainers strategy (low promotional content percentage and high social commerce score) includes those brands that scored high in social commerce, mainly because of the provision of informative content and brand–consumer interactions, but they were linked to more entertainment-oriented actions rather than product-related ones. Finally, the Social sellers strategy (high promotional content percentage and high social commerce score) includes those brands that have integrated social commerce into their online strategies and have subsequently exploited the potential of social media to drive online and offline sales. The database is built using original data from a content analysis of 100 luxury brands’ postings on five different social media platforms – namely Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and Pinterest. The total final sample included 12,132 Facebook posts, 21,216 tweets on Twitter, 1,105 YouTube videos, 10,138 Instagram pictures/videos, and 117,359 Pinterest pictures. The main findings are the following: luxury brands adopt at this stage the Social brand ambassadors and Social showcases approaches; brands belonging to the perfumery, cosmetics, jewelry and watches markets show a more developed attitude towards the social commerce; in other luxury markets, such as wine and spirits, brands still adopt a Social Brand Ambassador strategy, while managers should increase the promotional content in order develop the social commerce. The Fashion & Accessories brands show a positive relationship between the percentage of promotional content and social commerce score. This means that social commerce adoptions depend on the single brand’s strategic choices, ranging from low adoption to best practices. In general, social commerce is still not widespread; many luxury fashion brands, while presenting new collections during fashion weeks, focused on fashion shows, backstage events, and celebrities, rather than really promoting the new product lines with materials, availability, and purchasing indications. This social media approach is mainly focused on increasing brand awareness rather than increasing social commerce. If managers aim at increasing social commerce they should add direct call to action and link the contents to e-commerce market place. Automotive brands are concentrated in the Social showcases area; This sector encounters natural limitations in the introduction of social commerce due to the difficulty of selling products through the digital channel; many brands have, however, devised strategies to approach their users during the purchasing process prior to the actual transaction to take advantage of the increasing ROPO phenomenon. Conversely, the Perfumes & Cosmetics sector shows a highly fragmented approach to social commerce. The content analysis based on single post contents has shown that actually the contents are based on pictures of the products, or the brand, information on events, and a large and increasing presence of video posts based storytelling about the history of the product and the brand heritage; the most social commerce oriented posts are picture or video focused on the product. The commercial contents that aim at developing the see now, buy now approach are mainly based on video shows.

Modern applications often need to manage and analyze widely diverse datasets that span multiple data models [1], [2], [3], [4], [5]. Warehousing the data through Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) processes can be expensive in such scenarios. Transforming disparate data into a single data model may degrade performance. Further, curating diverse datasets and maintaining the pipeline can prove to be labor intensive. As a result, an emerging trend is to shift the focus to federating specialized data stores and enabling query processing across heterogeneous data models [6]. This shift can bring many advantages: First, systems can natively leverage multiple data models, which can translate to maximizing the semantic expressiveness of underlying interfaces and leveraging the internal processing capabilities of component data stores. Second, federated architectures support query-specific data integration with just-in-time transformation and migration, which has the potential to significantly reduce the operational complexity and overhead. Projects that focus on developing systems in this research area stem from various backgrounds and address diverse concerns, which could make it difficult to form a consistent view of the work in this area. In this survey, we introduce a taxonomy for describing the state of the art and propose a systematic evaluation framework conducive to understanding of query-processing characteristics in the relevant systems. We use the framework to assess four representative implementations: BigDAWG [7], [8], CloudMdsQL [9], [10], Myria [11], [12], and Apache Drill [13].

This study intends to investigate some practical problems that arise from the development of the social commerce market and propose a set of consumer protection policies. To that purpose, we discuss the concept of social commerce and analyze a few common types of social commerce in Korea. Then, we look into the problems of the social commerce industry and propose a set of consumer protection policies that can deal with those problems. The goal of the current paper is to suggest optimal policies that can protect consumers from this new trend of online transactions. We hope that the proposals can help establish the base of consumer protection from the social commerce business. Key Words : social commerce, consumer protection, problems of social commerce, consumer policies * Professor, Dept. of Advertising and Public Relations, Namseoul University 논문접수: 2012년 7월 18일, 1차 수정을 거쳐, 심사완료: 2012년 8월 21일 1. The purpose of analysis 1.1 The concept of social commerceSocial commerce refers to the online transactions that occur through social network service. A group purchase with more than a certain number of consumers makes a considerable rate of discount possible. The name 'social commerce' comes from the fact that consumers use social network service in order to gather a group of interested users and put the discount through. The online dictionary Wikipedia defines the term as 'a subset of electronic commerce that involves using social media, online media that supports social interaction and user contributions, to assist in the online buying and selling of products and services'. Others call it 'social shopping'. In the portal site Naver.com, it is defined as 'a type of electronic transaction where a certain product or service is sold at a considerably discounted price for a certain period of time with the condition that a minimum number of buyers have to purchase'.The term 'social commerce' was first introduced in 2005, when Yahoo developed the pick-list sharing service of Shoposphere. In 2008, the online discount coupon service named Groupon launched a business model of group purchasing and the concept of social commerce has gained popularity around the globe. The basic flow of social commerce is presented below in

Social commerce was established with the growing commercial use of social media platforms, centered around e-commerce features and actors (buyers, influencers, and sellers) which provide user-generated content through recommendations on products and services. Important factors are both the utilization of social media platforms as trusted sources by users and the trusted content from users posting their experiences and opinions. This study focuses on Swiss consumers (9 out of 10 Swiss residents are active online) and their usage of social media, e-commerce, and social commerce as a source of trusted product information and platforms to share their own product experiences. While social media usage in Switzerland is high (almost all online users are using some form of social media), only one-third are using social media (primarily YouTube) as a source of information that guides decision-making. Merely one in ten respondents post their experiences—satisfaction or recommendations for products and services—on social media at least once a month. Our research data show that in Switzerland, social commerce is an underdeveloped marketing concept as to available e-commerce features and the degree of trusted user-generated content about products and services on social media platforms.

An entirely updated e-commerce platform referred to as Social Commerce was developed in response to the rise in social media use. Social commerce integrates interactions between buyers and sellers made possible by social media platforms and Web 2.0 technology. It is frequently seen as a subfield of e-commerce. Social commerce has been successfully introduced in developing countries. Many businesses around the world are small and medium enterprises (SMEs). For instance, SMEs in Indonesia can contribute up to 60.34% of the country's GDP and have a substantial labor pool. Using social commerce as an e-commerce platform can significantly improve the operational efficiency of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). However, little empirical research has specifically examined how SMEs embrace social commerce. Given the high level of concern, further research is required. Therefore, the current study experimentally examined how local SMEs in rural Indonesia introduced social commerce. The study was modeled using the Unified Theory of Technology Acceptance and Use (UTAUT) 2 model and several previous studies. SmartPLS 4 software was used to model and evaluate data using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). The findings of the 114 samples showed that relative advantage, social support, facilitation conditions, and the government's support of social commerce influenced behavioral intention to use social commerce. Behavioral intention to use social commerce influences the actual use of social commerce. The findings of this study can help local governments and policymakers develop social trade promotion regulations to help potential SMEs and entrepreneurs gain long-term business support.

PurposeIn today’s business world, adopting social commerce for day-to-day operations has increasingly become an important phenomenon. Several factors have been identified by previous researchers regarding the adoption of social commerce, but academic research is scarce on the relationship between the factors influencing social commerce adoption and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the post-COVID-19 situation. This study aims to identify the impact of technological, environmental and entrepreneurial factors on the adoption of social commerce by SMEs in Sri Lanka.Design/methodology/approachA quantitative study utilised the deductive approach and collected data through a field survey by distributing a five-point Likert scale questionnaire to conveniently selected respondents from Sri Lankan SMEs. Structural equation modelling (SEM) was used for the analysis of 384 responses.FindingsThe results revealed that technological factors [technology availability (TA) and cost-effectiveness (CE)], environmental factors [bandwagon effect (BE)] and entrepreneurial factors [attitude (AT), innovativeness (IN) and IT knowledge (IK)] have a significant impact on the social commerce adoption of SMEs in Sri Lanka. This study, as the first of its type, offers insightful information on the influence of variables on the adoption of social commerce after the COVID-19 pandemic.Research limitations/implicationsSimilar to any research, this study also has inherent limitations. Due to time and financial restrictions, the study’s convenience sampling method was adopted. The study’s possible limitation is its narrow focus, which could mean that it only examines a select few social media (SM) networks. The study’s conclusions might be less generalised since it focused on the western province of Sri Lanka. Future studies should take a cross-cultural strategy to explore the influence of social commerce adoption to improve the generalisability of research findings.Practical implicationsThis study provides an in-depth assessment of critical factors, facilitating policymakers, owners, leaders and managers (decision-makers) to gain insight into the real influencing factors on social commerce adoption and the significance of SM. The study helps them comprehend how outstanding governance and knowledge of influencing factors can boost SME success in various ways. For example, research reveals that various factors have a major influence on social commerce adoption.Social implicationsThere has been limited research conducted on social commerce adoption after the COVID-19 pandemic period; thus, this study looked at the variables influencing it amongst SMEs in a South Asian developing country like Sri Lanka after the pandemic lasted for two years. By placing a strong emphasis on the role of entrepreneurial characteristics and the available technology within one single framework in the context of SMEs and their involvement with social commerce adoption, this study contributes to the past literature by emphasising the role of several significant factors in SMEs' adoption of social commerce. Whilst previous studies looked at multiple factors influencing the adoption of social commerce globally, this study focussed on how these factors have a significant impact on SMEs in Sri Lanka.Originality/valueThis study developed a multi-perspective framework combining technological, environmental and entrepreneurial factors influencing SMEs to adopt social commerce. The study provides a contribution to the literature on social commerce adoption from the perspective of SMEs in a developing country like Sri Lanka after COVID-19. Exclusively, it examines the impact of entrepreneur-related factors on social commerce adoption.

<p>The heterogeneous nature of environmental systems poses a challenge to researchers constructing environmental models. Many simulation models of integrated systems need to incorporate phenomena that are represented as spatially and temporally continuous fields as well as phenomena that are modelled as spatially and temporally bounded agents. Examples include moving animals (agents) interacting with vegetation (fields) or static water reservoirs (agents) as components of hydrological catchments (fields). However, phenomena bounded in space and time have particular properties mainly because they require representation of multiple (sometimes mobile) objects that each exist in a small subdomain of the space-time domain of interest. Moreover, these subdomains of objects may overlap in space and time such as interleaving branches due to tree crown growth. Efficient storage and access of different types of phenomena requires an approach that integrates representation of fields and objects in a single data model.</p><p>We develop the open-source LUE data model that explicitly stores and separates domain information, i.e. where phenomena exist in the space-time domain, and property information, i.e. what attribute value the phenomenon has at a particular space-time location, for a particular object. Notable functionalities are support for multiple spatio-temporal objects, time domains, objects linked to multiple space and time domains, and relations between objects. The design of LUE is based on the conceptual data model of de Bakker (2017) and implemented as a physical data model using HDF5 and C++ (de Jong, 2019). Our LUE data model is part of a new modelling language implemented in Python, allowing for operations accepting both fields and agents as arguments, and therefore resembling and extending the map algebra approach to field-agent modelling.</p><p>We present the conceptual and physical data models and illustrate the usage by implementing a spatial agent-based model simulating changes in human nutrition. We thereby consider the interaction between personal demand and supply of healthy food of nearby stores as well as the influence of agent's social network.</p><p><br>

<p>Although the field of social commerce has gained a lot of attention recently, there are many areas that still remain unexplored. A new phenomenon emerging within virtual communities is a blurring between social and commercial activities. To date, scholars in the social commerce literature have either focused on customers in the community or on medium to large scale businesses. There has been little research on social commerce communities which include micro-businesses despite their rapid growth in South East Asian countries. This study explores a social commerce community of Malay lifestyle bloggers, who are a subset of the Malaysian blogosphere community. Bloggers begin by using the personal genre, some then move on to set up online businesses using their personal blogs as a platform. The characteristic of blogging’s ease of use means there are low barriers to starting a small business, merging blogging and commerce. This changes the nature of the community by bringing in a new relationship, as well as relationships between bloggers and readers, there are now also relationships between sellers and customers. This study aims to understand the motivations for both sellers and customers, and how their relationships as bloggers and readers influence their participation in social commerce within the same community. To address the research objective, 20 sellers and 21 customers who also play a role as bloggers or readers were interviewed. In-depth interviews using laddering and semi-structured interview techniques were carried out to explore social commerce behaviour, the perceived consequences, and goals or values of participation. In addition, observation was also conducted on the platform used by the sellers. Data was coded using NVivo whilst the themes arising from the coding process were transformed into an implication matrix and hierarchical value map using Ladderux software. This study found that strong ties within the community, influenced by homophily and the sense of virtual community, motivated the customers to participate in commercial activities in order to obtain their goals which included a sense of obligation, loyalty, satisfaction and self-esteem. The relationships influenced customers to trust each other, provide social support and made purchasing products more convenient. Sellers were influenced by the convenience of using social media and the social support provided by the customers which helped them to achieve their goals which are profit and business sustainability. This study contributes to social commerce theory by highlighting an underexplored type of social commerce setting and addressing how trust can be transferred from social to commercial activities. The findings provide a useful insight for businesses, regardless of their size, to build an understanding of the need to create a good relationship with their customers. For macro-businesses, this model can be used to identify what is lacking in their social media marketing strategy.</p>

Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) are required to understand social media and strategies for using social commerce for business expansions in this new digital era. SMEs are important to the economic growth of any country since they play a major role in most international economies. In the same manner, the COVID-19 pandemic has reformed people's mode of lifestyle and dealing with information. This study has led to the expansion of social commerce especially related to entrepreneurs and SME owners. This study focuses on the impact of entrepreneurial factors when adopting social commerce by SMEs in Sri Lanka. The framework has been developed with the factors of Attitude (AT), Innovativeness (IN), and IT Knowledge (IK) under the entrepreneurial factors. The present research conducted a thorough quantitative study of the impact of entrepreneurial factors when adopting social commerce by SMEs. The simple random sampling technique was utilized to select SMEs from the target population of SMEs listed at chambers of commerce. 384 SMEs in the Western Province were selected for the data analysis of this research. Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) was used to test the developed hypotheses. The results indicated that adopting social commerce in Sri Lankan SMEs is practical and hugely beneficial to all parties involved. Entrepreneurs who are interested in applying social commerce for their businesses will find the study to be insightful. The study's findings showed the importance of utilizing social commerce in daily business activities as most SME owners hold the belief of possessing the required knowledge, skills, and resources in their business operations on social media as the focal point with a special emphasis on entrepreneurial factors. Keywords: Entrepreneurial Factors, Small and Medium Enterprises and Social Commerce.

Social media have wrought significant change since their inception. They have grown by leaps and bounds, transitioning from social networks to a powerful shopping platform known as social commerce. While some users embrace this technology, others opt out for various reasons. The objective of this study is to examine the factors that influence Malaysian consumers' social commerce shopping intentions. The extended technology acceptance model (TAM) was used to develop the conceptual framework. An online questionnaire was distributed across several social media platforms. Using convenience sampling, a total of 233 Malaysians participated in the study. The data was analyzed using multiple regression analysis. The study found that perceived enjoyment, trust, and electronic word of mouth (eWOM) had a significant influence on Malaysian consumers' social commerce purchase intentions, while perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and social influence did not. Trust is the most influential factor affecting Malaysian consumers' purchase intentions in social commerce, followed by perceived enjoyment and eWOM. This study hopes to add to the limited knowledge on social commerce and consumer behavior and provide retailers and marketers of social commerce with insights that will enable them to better understand their customers' preferences and, in turn, provide better service.

There is a tremendous interest in big data by academia, industry and a large user base. Several commercial and open source providers unleashed a variety of products to support big data storage and processing. As these products mature, there is a need to evaluate and compare the performance of these systems.In this paper, we present BigBench, an end-to-end big data benchmark proposal. The underlying business model of BigBench is a product retailer. The proposal covers a data model and synthetic data generator that addresses the variety, velocity and volume aspects of big data systems containing structured, semi-structured and unstructured data. The structured part of the BigBench data model is adopted from the TPC-DS benchmark, which is enriched with semi-structured and unstructured data components. The semi-structured part captures registered and guest user clicks on the retailer's website. The unstructured data captures product reviews submitted online. The data generator designed for BigBench provides scalable volumes of raw data based on a scale factor. The BigBench workload is designed around a set of queries against the data model. From a business prospective, the queries cover the different categories of big data analytics proposed by McKinsey. From a technical prospective, the queries are designed to span three different dimensions based on data sources, query processing types and analytic techniques.We illustrate the feasibility of BigBench by implementing it on the Teradata Aster Database. The test includes generating and loading a 200 Gigabyte BigBench data set and testing the workload by executing the BigBench queries (written using Teradata Aster SQL-MR) and reporting their response times.

The increased popularity of social networking sites, such as Linkedln, Facebook, and Twitter, has opened opportunities for new business models for electronic commerce, often referred to as social commerce. Social commerce involves using Web 2.0 social media technologies and infrastructure to support online interactions and user contributions to assist in the acquisition of products and services. Social media technologies not only provide a new platform for entrepreneurs to innovate but also raise a variety of new issues for e-commerce researchers that require the development of new theories. This could become one of the most challenging research arenas in the coming decade. The purpose of this introduction is to present a framework that integrates several elements in social commerce research and to summarize the papers included in this special issue. The framework includes six key elements for classifying social commerce research: research theme, social media, commercial activities, underlying theories, outcomes, and research methods. The proposed framework is valuable in defining the scope and identifying potential research issues in social commerce. We also explain how the papers included in this special issue fit into the proposed research framework.

Abstract: The adaptation of social media to the socio-economic and cultural realities of the Senegalese population encourages the practice of e-commerce on these platforms. Indeed, social media platforms such as Facebook, WhatsaApp and Tiktok are used by users as electronic marketplaces, where they advertise, sell and buy products and services online. This appears to be an innovation on these platforms, which were originally simple online communication spaces, hence the practice of social commerce. This article, the fruit of a qualitative survey, sets out to analyze the structuring of social media, Facebook, WhatsApp and Tiktok, and the use made of them by social commerce players in Rufisque. Thus, the online commercial activities of Rufisque's inhabitants on these platforms are described from a sociological angle, with the aim of analyzing and understanding the innovative capacity of Rufisque's e-commerce actors, users of social media. Keywords: E-commerce - E-merchant - E-buyer - Social commerce – Rufisque.

Social commerce has become a recent phenomenon and is poised to grow rapidly in the next few years. To better address customer behavior on social commerce platforms, it is imperative to acquire a comprehensive understanding of social commerce from the perspective of service quality. The objective of this research is to examine the dimensions of social commerce service quality and to reveal the factors influencing purchase intentions among the expanding user population. This study identified seven critical dimensions of social commerce service quality (website design, fulfilment, customer service, communication, contact, credibility, and security) that influence purchase intention. This research adopts a questionnaire survey method to collect data from social commerce users. Using PLS-SEM, the findings from an empirical analysis, conducted with a sample of 411 social commerce users, demonstrate that all measured dimensions significantly impact the intention to purchase. The findings also demonstrate that e-commerce has considerable influence on customer purchase intention as a partial mediator in social commerce. The findings hold significant implications for social commerce enterprises to increase customer attraction by identifying the motivations behind their purchasing decisions.