Numerical Taxonomy aims to group in clusters, using so-called structure analysis of operational taxonomic units (OTUs or taxons or taxa) through numerical methods.
These clusters constitute families. Structural analysis, based on their phenotypic characteristics, exhibits the relationships, in terms of…

The paper presents a case study illustrating a collaborative problem solving process in Virtual Communities of Practice. The process relies on the existence of an underlying shared knowledge base – a repository of resources, and is carried out collaboratively by…

There is a lot of information published on the Web that can be useful for decision-making.
The work reported in this paper focuses on how to extract and integrate this information in order to construct a Data Warehouse that makes…

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 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 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

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…

This paper is an attempt to define how a
specific data structure might be used to
store, in a persistent manner, temporal
information during a computer simulation.
In particular, it considers the sort of
temporal information generated during a
discrete…

We describe the design, implementation and deployment of the multi-level agent-based system architecture developed for the SEWASIE project. The aim of the system is to help the user in querying heterogeneous data sources which are integrated by means of ontologies.…