Middleware systems compriseprogrammingmodels, abstractions, protocols, and services to facilitate the design, the development, the integration, and the - ployment of distributed applications in heterogeneous computing environments. Conceptually, the term middleware refers to a layer of software above the networking substrate and the operating system and below the (distributed) application. In practice these boundaries are not clear cut, with middleware functionality moving into and out of these layers. Remote communication, p- lish/subscribe, messaging, and (distributed) transaction...

Distributed Infrastructure Support For E-Commerce And Distributed Applications is organized in three parts. The first part constitutes an overview, a more detailed motivation of the problem context, and a tutorial-like introduction to middleware systems. The second part is comprised of a set of chapters that study solutions to leverage the trade-off between a transparent programming model and application-level enabled resource control. The third part of this book presents three detailed distributed application case studies and demonstrates how standard middleware platforms...

Symbolic processing has limitations highlighted by the symbol grounding problem. Computational processing methods, like fuzzy logic, neural networks, and statistical methods have appeared to overcome these problems. However, they also suffer from drawbacks in that, for example, multi-stage inference is difficult to implement. Deep fusion of symbolic and computational processing is expected to open a new paradigm for intelligent systems. Symbolic processing and computational processing should interact at all abstract or computational levels. For this undertaking, attempts to combine,...