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Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to study the development of research in computer science in 15 Eastern European countries following the breaching of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Design/methodology/approach – The authors conducted a bibliometric analysis of 82,121 computer science publications indexed in the Web of Science database and investigated publication, citation, and collaboration patterns of the individual countries. Findings – Poland has been the most productive country, followed by Russia, the Czech Republic, Romania, Hungary, and Slovenia. Publication rates have increased substantially over the period, but this has not been accompanied by a corresponding increase in the quality of the publications. Hungary and Slovenia are the most influential countries in terms of citations per paper. Artificial Intelligence is the most frequently occurring computer science subject category, with Interdisciplinary Applications the category with the greatest impact. USA, Germany, UK, France, and Canada are the most frequently collaborating western nations, and papers published in collaboration with US authors accrue the most citations. Originality/value – This is the first ever bibliometric study of the whole post-communist Eastern European computer science research as indexed in the Web of Science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

E-commerce business process nets (EBPNs) are a novel formal model for describing and validating e-commerce systems including interactive parties such as shopper, merchant, and third-party payment platform. Data errors and nondeterminacy of the data states during the trading process can be depicted with the help of EBPNs. However, the problem about how to analyze EBPNs remains largely open. To analyze their data-liveness, data-boundedness, and reachability, this paper presents two analysis methods. For EBPNs, reachability analysis is proposed based on a 3-D incidence matrix method. Additionally, reduction methods are proposed for a special EBPN. Finally, the validity and reliability of the proposed methods are illustrated via the examples of e-commerce systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1999, Lawrence Lessig published a since famous analogy, framed in the catchphrase “Code is Law”. By this he meant the normative dimensions that technology and legal norms both inherited. But how can the normative content of code be unveiled? And if code really is law, can they not both be treated and interpreted in just the same way? Legal science in civil law systems has come up with a profound analytic methodology to interpret legal norms hermeneutically and thus to find the normative meaning of law. Scholars working on the relation between technology and human behavior at this point struggle with the lack of a shared language, making it difficult to articulate their findings and opinions on normative content of technology. They can benefit from this discursive basis in an ensuing discourse by strengthening their results of code interpretation by applying the tools provided in this paper to rationalize their argumentation and make discrepancies with the interpretations of others visible. Through the proposed methodology of code analysis they can also find relevant questions for further empirical investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]