FOREWORD

Information Management has become an important part of modern life, gathering together a very interesting and varied group of professionals, including hardware and software technicians, social planners, business people, operations specialists, communications specialists, and many others. As we have indicated in the past, a major purpose of the journal is to allow these specialists to gain a glimpse of important work being done outside their own areas of professional interest.

In this issue of the IJCEM we have a miscellany of articles that will appeal to both fellow specialists of the authors and those working outside the particular specialty. In providing such a range of articles, we hope that we are contributing to the development and maintenance of a true Information Management community that will be more effective than more loosely organized groups of professionals working in isolation from other professionals.

Our first article, by Musslih I.A. Harba, Law Yaw Eng and Che Mat Hadzir, looks at a way a Form Markup Language can develop, distribute, and retrieve flexible forms over the Internet. With its worldwide reach and growing size, the World Wide Web can be a very important resource for data collection as long as there is a convenient way to reach those having the raw data and allow them to present that data in a convenient manner. By presenting a language that makes that possible, the authors make an important contribution that will be of interest to Internet-based marketers, systems operators, and many, many others.

Sherif Kamel's discussion of the origins of the information society in Egypt, places greatest emphasis on the government's role in encouraging this advancement and in the development of the infrastructure that makes this possible. This case study will be of interest not only to academics in Egypt and to those who have dealings with Egypt, but to anyone who is interested in using the Internet to encourage development.

Liaquat Hossain's study of the Thai National Telecommunications infrastructure can also be read as a case study, but here the major emphasis is on the planning aspects of information technology development. The author emphasizes the importance of planning and makes some key distinctions that have to be taken into consideration by anyone involved in the planning process. It will also be of wide interest to all those involved in IT development.

From the macro view of Kamel's and Hossain's article, we end by returning to the micro view of the initial article in Cheng-Hong Yang's, Shyang-Lung Lin's and BingChiang Cheng's discussion of a statistical method for comparing routing algorithms. Such algorithms play an important role in systems work and report on an advance that would allow a better comparison of alternate methods which will be of interest to very many organizational experts.

And so our dialogue continues, and will continue in the exciting future issues being prepared for our readers.

Prof. Dr. Srisakdi Charmonman
Editor-In-Chief