Current developments in Central Europe will have far-reaching consequences on the region's forestry and related institutional arrangements, such as forest administration, extension services and forest research. Future prospects for the rural population living on income from forestry will considerably depend on how individuals and organisations react in view of these changes. It will be vitally important how forest owners and managers apply new knowledge in forestry and how organisations best deal with the emerging changes. Innovation and entrepreneurship are main driving forces for economic...

The complexity of systems studied in distributed artificial intelligence (DAI), such as multi-agent systems, often makes it extremely difficult or even impossible to correctly and completely specify their behavioral repertoires and dynamics. There is broad agreement that such systems should be equipped with the ability to learn in order to improve their future performance autonomously. The interdisciplinary cooperation of researchers from DAI and machine learning (ML) has established a new and very active area of research and development enjoying steadily increasing attention from both...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Cooperative Information Systems, CIA'99, held in Uppsala, Sweden in July/August 1999.
The 16 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 46 submissions. Also included are ten invited contributions by leading experts. The volume is divided in sections on information discovery and management on the Internet; information agents on the Internet-prototypes systems and applications; communication and collaboration, mobile information agents; rational information agents for...

Innovation is increasingly recognized as a key factor in environmental protection and balanced sustainable development within the forestry sector.

This volume provides a comprehensive theoretical foundation for the analysis of innovation processes and policies in a traditional, rural sector as well as presenting empirical analyses of innovation processes from major innovation areas. Territorial services of the forest sector are examined, including various types of forest ecosystem services such as carbon sequestration or recreation and wood value chains, including timber frame...

Um Erkenntnisse uber Verlauf und Richtung der Automatisierungsprozesse zu gewinnen und um die Voraussetzungen fur eine Gestaltung dieser Prozesse verbessern zu konnen, wurden die technischen Entwicklungslinien sowie die sozialen und okonomischen Auswirkungen auf die Organisation, auf Arbeitsplatze und private Haushalte untersucht sowie Moglichkeiten zur sozialvertraglichen Technikgestaltung durch die Kreditinstitute als Anwender und fur die betroffenen Beschaftigten erarbeitet.Fur eine sozialvertragliche Technikgestaltung ist es erforderlich, das Problembewusstsein uber die betrieblichen und...