The structure and infrastructure of Mexico's science and technology

The structure and infrastructure of the Mexican technical literature was determined. A representative database of technical articles was extracted from the Science Citation Index for the year 2002, with each article containing at least one author with a Mexican address. Many different manual and statistical clustering methods were used to identify the structure of the technical literature (especially the science and technology core competencies). One of the pervasive technical topics identified from the clustering, thin films research, was analyzed further using bibliometrics, in order to identify the infrastructure of this technology. Published by Elsevier Inc.

Intelligent decision support for family financial planning

In today’s financial markets characterized by constantly changing tax laws and increasingly complex transactions, the demand for family financial planning (FFP) services is rising dramatically. However, the current trend to develop advisory systems that focus mainly on the financial or investment side fails to consider the whole picture of FFP. Separating financial or investment advice from legal and accounting advice may result in conflicting advice or important omissions that could lead to users suffering financial loss. In this paper, we propose a conceptual model for FFP decision-making process, followed by a novel architecture to support an aggregated FFP decision process by utilizing intelligentagents and Web-services technology. A prototype system for supporting FFP decision is presented to demonstrate the advances of the proposed Web-service multi-agentsbased system architecture and business value.