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…

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…

Ontology mapping involves the task of finding similarities among overlapping sources by using ontologies. In a Federated System in which distributed, autonomous and heterogeneous information sources must be integrated, ontologies have emerged as tools to solve semantic heterogeneity problems. In…

The appearance and continuous growth of virtual communities on the web imposes the challenge of coping with the large amount of information and knowledge these communities produce. The Semantic Web with its set of standards and technologies provides the basic…

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…

In this paper, we present a UML profile and a group of UML patterns for documenting the component-and-connector views of software architectures [8]. They facilitate the creation of the component and connector viewtype in any UML 2.0 tool with a…

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…

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…