This book provides an excellent foundation for the principles of database and data management. It explains some of the more difficult concepts fairly well. The book is meant for an introductory course in database management which is usually required as…

Software tools processing partially common set of data should share an understanding of what these data mean. Since ontologies have been used to express formally a shared understanding of information, we argue that they can be used to improve integration…

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…

Knowledge-intensive processes are widely used to recover from errors, handle exceptional cases and complaints, and to improve or adapt a process itself. In this context, evolved Business-Process Reengineering (BPR) techniques are changing to give some answers to this reality. In…

When stakeholders are geographically distributed communication presents new challenges for software engineering community. In order to improve communication between stakeholders, we have previously proposed to apply learning style models to characterise the way people interact. In this work we enhance…

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…

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 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. When integrating data, several issues must be addressed. Here, we focus on the problem…

Product-line architectures, i.e. a software architecture and component set shared by a family of products, represents a promising approach to achieving reuse of software. Several companies are initiating or have recently adopted a product-line architecture. However, little experience is available…

Using COTS software promises faster time-to-market, which can yield substantial advantages over competitors with regards to earlier placement of a new product on a market. At the same time, component-based software introduces risks, such as unknown quality properties of the…