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…

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…

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 main objective of this paper centers on reviewing the evolution of Decision Support System´s (DSS) architectures, particularly as they apply to natural resources. Today it is difficult to conceive the existence of a rural planning automated system that doesn't…

Since huge amounts of spatial data can be easily collected from various applications, ranging from remote sensing technology to geographical information system, the extraction and comprehension of spatial knowledge is a more and more important task. Many excellent studies on…

Ensuring the correctness of a given software component has become a crucial aspect in Software Engineering and the Model Checking technique provides a fully automated way to achieve this goal. In particular, the usage of Model Checking in formal languages…

Electronic Government applications aim to deliver efficient, seamless, customer-focused services to the public using various distribution channels. One of challenges in building such applications is the requirement to rely upon preexisting, often heterogeneous government applications. In order to enable communication…

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…

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…