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There has been an increased interest in the use of semantic description and matching techniques, to support service discovery and to overcome the limitations in the traditional syntactic approaches. However, the existing semantic matching approaches lack certain desirable properties that must be present in an effective solution to support service discovery. The purpose of this paper is to present a solution to facilitate the effective semantic matching of resource requests and advertisements in pervasive environments.

The paper presents a semantic description and matching approach to facilitate resource discovery in pervasive environments; the approach includes a ranking mechanism that orders services according to their suitability and also considers priorities placed on individual requirements in a request.

The solution has been evaluated for its effectiveness and the results have shown that the matcher results agree reasonably well with human judgement. The solution was also evaluated for its efficiency/scalability and from the experimental results obtained, it can be observed that for most practical situations, matching time can be considered acceptable for reasonable numbers of advertisements and request sizes.

The proposed approach improves existing semantic matching solutions in several key aspects. Specifically; it presents an effective approximate matching and ranking criterion and incorporates priority consideration in the matching process. As shown in the evaluation experiments, these features significantly improve the effectiveness of semantic matching.

Explains Inglehart’s theory that in advanced industrial societies, individual values have moved from materialism to a greater emphasis on freedom, self‐expression and the quality of life, or “postmaterialism”, and observes that postmaterialists want to work with people they like and to do interesting work rather than have a high salary or job security. Applies Inglehart’s theory of societal value change to assess a police organizational reform. Conducts a survey of the Washington State Police. Finds that command staff show the highest profession of postmaterialist values and troopers show the lowest. Believes leadership turnover is more likely than conversion to new values to bring about management commitment to community policing.

Using questionnaires and interviews, a survey was undertaken of publishers/producers of electronic information with regard to retention, storage and access. It was found that, although some large publishers were innovative with their use of electronic material for different purposes, many commercial publishers are only gradually getting involved with electronic production methods and few have policies on electronic archiving. Among publishers, there is a low level of awareness of the Knowledge Warehouse project and a marked disinclination to deposit material with a national electronic archive on a voluntary basis. Database producers have more interest in electronic archiving and take more measures to refresh their magnetic media. There is some evidence of material produced in electronic form only that is in danger of being deleted from databases, electronic newsletters and videotex. CD‐ROM is the medium of the future for several publishers and database producers. The archival life of various electronic media is considered, and standards relating to electronic publishing are discussed. Some initiatives in electronic archiving are described.

The Glasgow Branch of B.S.A. Tools Ltd., and of the distributing organization, Burton, Griffiths & Co. Ltd., Machine Tools and Small Tools, has been moved to new premises at 46 Carlton Place, Glasgow, C.5. Telephone No.: South 1121/2.

This paper aims to report the results of a cross‐national cultural experiment on auditors' belief revision when evaluating internal control.

Hogarth and Einhorn's belief‐adjustment model (BAM) and Hofstede's national culture are employed. Two experimental conditions, created by crossing two levels of audit information: initial (un)favourable (UNFAV‐MODFAV) FAV‐MODFAV information, each followed by additional moderately favourable audit evidence and two levels of national culture dimensions of individualism (Australian auditors) and collectivism (Taiwanese auditors).

Consistent with BAM, the results of the experiment confirm that the evaluation task of internal control is an additive process. Collectivist culture auditors are found to revise their beliefs significantly upwards when encountering UNFAV‐MODFAV compared with FAV‐MODFAV, but not for individualist culture auditors. Collectivist culture auditors also revise their beliefs significantly upwards when they encounter UNFAV‐MODFAV compared with individualist culture auditors who do not revise their beliefs significantly upwards. However, neither collectivist nor individualist culture auditors revise their beliefs significantly upwards when encountering FAV‐MODFAV. Here, the multivariate regression shows that collectivist (individualist) culture auditors are (are not) concerned with “painting a good picture” to keep the client happy.

With globalisation, the national culture effect makes an important contribution to the disclosure of financial reporting. The findings of the research show that, in evaluating the internal control of an audit client, collectivist culture auditors revise their beliefs more favourably when encountering additional audit evidence which is relatively favourable (UNFAV‐MODFAV) compared with individualist culture auditors. In practice, the implications on auditors' reporting of the internal control (for example, Section 404 of the Sarbanes Oxley Act 2002) regulator need to take into consideration that the national culture of auditors is an important input in assessing control risk. In bridging the gap between research and practice, an urgent need has to be addressed, as it may impair the effectiveness of the audit. The collective culture auditor's concern to keep the client happy may be construed as not being independent.

The paper is the first to employ the BAM and Hofstede's national culture to test auditors of different national cultures in their belief revisions when evaluating the client's internal control.