During recent years, new software engineering paradigms like component-based software engineering and COTS-based development have emerged. Both paradigms are concerned with reuse and customisation of existing components. The use of COTS software has become more and more important in state-of-the-art…

Numerical Taxonomy aims to group in clusters, using so-called structure analysis of operational taxonomic units (OTUs or taxons or taxa) through numerical methods. Clusters that consitute families was the purpose of this series of last projects.
Structural analysis, based on…

This document describes a research and development project - Semantic Web and Cooperative Problem Solving for Online Communities of Practice. The aim of the project is to build a system supporting Cooperative Problem Solving within the framework of online Communities…

In spite of years of research and development, formal structured estimation of time and effort required to develop a Management Information System (MIS) is still an open problem. Usual estimation techniques applied by now are supported by the not so…

The refinement technique allows us to capture the relationship between specification and implementation in software developments. The precise documentation of the refinement relations hip makes it possible the traceability of the requirements through the refinement steps.
Unfortunately, the standard modelling…

The term Federated Databases refers to the data integration of distributed, autonomous and heterogeneous databases. However, a federation can also include information systems, not only databases. At integrating data, several issues must be addressed. Here, we focus on the problem…

The Semantic Web attempts to reach a state in the future where everything on the Web will no longer be only machine-readable, but also machine-understandable. An ontology is an explicit specification of a conceptualization. A conceptualization is an abstract, simplified…

The concept of “approximate” searching has applications in a vast number of fields. Some examples are non-traditional databases (e. g. storing images, fingerprints or audio clips, where the concept of exact search is of no use and we search instead…

The studies of Relational Data Base Management Systems and Databases constitute nowadays a main tren of investigation in large businesses and universities of the entire world. The creation of a data base engine keeps being a challenge since there are…

Vertical partitioning, in which attributes of a relation are
assigned to partitions, is aimed at improving database
performance. We extend previous research that is based on
a single relation to multi-relation database environment,
by including referential integrity constraints, access time