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 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…

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…

Ontologies serve as a mean to establish a conceptually concise basis for communicating knowledge for many purposes. Within the information integration area, ontologies are useful to solve heterogeneity problems. They provide a set of knowledge terms, including the vocabulary, the…

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…

Nowadays, data intensive applications are in constant demand and there is need of computing environments with better intelligent capabilities than those present in today's Database Management Systems (DBMS). To build such systems we need formalisms that can perform complicate inferences,…

This paper presents a data structure based on Sparse Spatial Selection (SSS) for similarity searching. An algorithm that tries periodically to adjust pivots to the use of database index is presented. This index is dynamic. In this way, it is…