In a global and increasingly competitive market, where organizations are driven by information, the search for ways to transform data into true knowledge is critical to a business's success. Few companies, however, have effective methods of managing the quality of this information. Because quality is a multidimensional concept, its management must consider a wide variety of issues related to information and data quality. Information and Database Quality is a compilation of works from research and industry that examines these issues, covering both the organizational and technical...

Aiding Decisions With Multiple Criteria: Essays in Honor of Bernard Roy is organized around two broad themes:

Graph Theory with path-breaking contributions on the theory of flows in networks and project scheduling,

Multiple Criteria Decision Aiding with the invention of the family of ELECTRE methods and methodological contribution to decision-aiding which lead to the creation of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA). Professor Bernard Roy has had considerable influence on the development of these two broad areas. /LIST Part one contains papers by...

Doppler Applications in LEO Satellite Communication Systems develops and presents an important class of techniques useful in the construction of little Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite communication systems. It centers on the very significant Doppler shift that attends communications through a LEO satellite and shows how this phenomenon can be exploited for an unexpected benefit. The techniques taught in the book are expected to be particularly attractive to system engineers because ground-based transceivers must generally compensate for the large Doppler component and therefore the...

IFIP Working Group 5.2 has organized a series of workshops extending the concept of intelligent CAD to the concept of "knowledge intensive engineering." The concept advocates that intensive life-cycle knowledge regarding products and design processes must be incorporated in the center of the CAD architecture. It focuses on the systematization and sharing of knowledge across the life-cycle stages and organizational boundaries.
From Knowledge Intensive CAD to Knowledge Intensive Engineering comprises the Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Knowledge Intensive CAD, which was...

Middleware Networks: Concept, Design and Deployment of Internet Infrastructure describes a framework for developing IP Service Platforms and emerging managed IP networks with a reference architecture from the AT&T Labs GeoPlex project. The main goal is to present basic principles that both the telecommunications industry and the Internet community can see as providing benefits for service-related network issues. As this is an emerging technology, the solutions presented are timely and significant.
Middleware Networks: Concept, Design and Deployment of Internet...

In our increasingly mobile world the ability to access information on demand at any time and place can satisfy people's information needs as well as confer on them a competitive advantage. The emergence of battery-operated, low-cost and portable computers such as palmtops and PDAs, coupled with the availability and exploitation of wireless networks, have made possible the potential for ubiquitous computing. Through the wireless networks, portable equipments will become an integrated part of existing distributed computing environments, and mobile users can have access to data stored at...

Information intermediation is the foundation stone of some of the most successful Internet companies, and is perhaps second only to the Internet Infrastructure companies. On the heels of information integration and interoperability, this book on information brokering discusses the next step in information interoperability and integration.
The emerging Internet economy based on burgeoning B2B and B2C trading will soon demand semantics-based information intermediation for its feasibility and success. B2B ventures are involved in the rationalization' of new vertical markets and construction...

Semantic Models for Multimedia Database Searching and Browsing begins with the introduction of multimedia information applications, the need for the development of the multimedia database management systems (MDBMSs), and the important issues and challenges of multimedia systems. The temporal relations, the spatial relations, the spatio-temporal relations, and several semantic models for multimedia information systems are also introduced. In addition, this book discusses recent advances in multimedia database searching and multimedia database browsing. More specifically, issues such...

The architectural concept of a memory hierarchy has been immensely successful, making possible today's spectacular pace of technology evolution in both the volume of data and the speed of data access. Its success is difficult to understand, however, when examined within the traditional "memoryless" framework of performance analysis. The memoryless' framework cannot properly reflect a memory hierarchy's ability to take advantage of patterns of data use that are transient. The Fractal Structure of Data Reference: Applications to the Memory Hierarchy both introduces, and...

Knowledge Base Systems are an integration of conventional database systems with Artificial Intelligence techniques. They provide inference capabilities to the database system by encapsulating the knowledge of the application domain within the database.
Knowledge is the most valuable of all corporate resources that must be captured, stored, re-used and continuously improved, in much the same way as database systems were important in the previous decade.
Flexible, extensible, and yet efficient Knowledge Base Systems are needed to capture the increasing demand for knowledge-based...