This work is a revision of the doctoral dissertation of Eduardo Mena pre sented to the Department of Computer Science and System Engineering at the University of Zaragoza (Spain) in November 1998 Mena 98]. The OBSERVER system was developed as a result of this Ph.D. thesis. This book is composed of eight chapters. In Chapter 1 we introduce our rationale for writing a book about systems that process queries in global information systems. Then in Chapter 2 we review the techno logical context for our work, including distributed and heterogeneous environments and the use of ontologies. We also...

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed joint post-proceedings of nine workshops held as part of the 10th International Conference on Extending Database Technology, EDBT 2006, held in Munich, Germany in March 2006. The 70 revised full papers presented were selected from numerous submissions during two rounds of reviewing and revision.

This work is a revision of the doctoral dissertation of Eduardo Mena pre- sented to the Department of Computer Science and System Engineering at the University of Zaragoza (Spain) in November 1998 Mena 98]. The OBSERVER system was developed as a result of this Ph.D. thesis. This book is composed of eight chapters. In Chapter 1 we introduce our rationale for writing a book about systems that process queries in global information systems. Then in Chapter 2 we review the techno- logical context for our work, including distributed and heterogeneous environments and the use of ontologies. We also...