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…

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.…

Most information in science, engineering and business has been recorded in form of text. This information can be found online in the World-Wide-Web. One of the major tools to support information access are the search engines which usually use information…

A Federated System is a collection of independent, cooperative, possibly heterogeneous and autonomous computer systems (usually database systems) which allows sharing all or some of its data. A Service-Oriented Architecture is an application architecture whose functionalities are defined as independent…

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…

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…

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 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…