Poor data quality can seriously hinder or damage the efficiency and effectiveness of organizations and businesses. The growing awareness of such repercussions has led to major public initiatives like the "Data Quality Act" in the USA and the "European 2003/98" directive of the European Parliament.

Batini and Scannapieco present a comprehensive and systematic introduction to the wide set of issues related to data quality. They start with a detailed description of different data quality dimensions, like accuracy, completeness, and consistency, and their importance in different...

The Web has become the world's largest database, with search being the main tool that allows organizations and individuals to exploit its huge amount of information. Search on the Web has been traditionally based on textual and structural similarities, ignoring to a large degree the semantic dimension, i.e., understanding the meaning of the query and of the document content. Combining search and semantics gives birth to the idea of semantic search. Traditional search engines have already advertised some semantic dimensions. Some of them, for instance, can enhance their generated result...

Nowadays, Web applications are almost omnipresent. The Web has become a platform not only for information delivery, but also for eCommerce systems, social networks, mobile services, and distributed learning environments. Engineering Web applications involves many intrinsic challenges due to their distributed nature, content orientation, and the requirement to make them available to a wide spectrum of users who are unknown in advance. The authors discuss these challenges in the context of well-established engineering processes, covering the whole product lifecycle from requirements...

Data matching (also known as record or data linkage, entity resolution, object identification, or field matching) is the task of identifying, matching and merging records that correspond to the same entities from several databases or even within one database. Based on research in various domains including applied statistics, health informatics, data mining, machine learning, artificial intelligence, database management, and digital libraries, significant advances have been achieved over the last decade in all aspects of the data matching process, especially on how to improve the accuracy...

With the proliferation of huge amounts of (heterogeneous) data on the Web, the importance of information retrieval (IR) has grown considerably over the last few years. Big players in the computer industry, such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo , are the primary contributors of technology for fast access to Web-based information; and searching capabilities are now integrated into most information systems, ranging from business management software and customer relationship systems to social networks and mobile phone applications.

Ceri and his co-authors aim at taking their readers from...

Mashups have emerged as an innovative software trend that re-interprets existing Web building blocks and leverages the composition of individual components in novel, value-adding ways. Additional appeal also derives from their potential to turn non-programmers into developers.

Daniel and Matera have written the first comprehensive reference work for mashups. They systematically cover the main concepts and techniques underlying mashup design and development, the synergies among the models involved at different levels of abstraction and the way models materialize into composition...

Data matching (also known as record or data linkage, entity resolution, object identification, or field matching) is the task of identifying, matching and merging records that correspond to the same entities from several databases or even within one database. Based on research in various domains including applied statistics, health informatics, data mining, machine learning, artificial intelligence, database management, and digital libraries, significant advances have been achieved over the last decade in all aspects of the data matching process, especially on how to improve the accuracy...

The Web has become the world's largest database, with search being the main tool that allows organizations and individuals to exploit its huge amount of information. Search on the Web has been traditionally based on textual and structural similarities, ignoring to a large degree the semantic dimension, i.e., understanding the meaning of the query and of the document content. Combining search and semantics gives birth to the idea of semantic search. Traditional search engines have already advertised some semantic dimensions. Some of them, for instance, can enhance their generated result...

This book presents a comprehensive and systematic introduction to transforming process-oriented data into information about the underlying business process, which is essential for all kinds of decision-making. To that end, the authors develop step-by-step models and analytical tools for obtaining high-quality data structured in such a way that complex analytical tools can be applied. The main emphasis is on process mining and data mining techniques and the combination of these methods for process-oriented data.

After a general introduction to the business intelligence (BI) process...