This book gives a unique account of the emerging field of Web engineering by presenting 25 thoroughly reviewed papers drawn from two recent workshops on the topic together with introductory and motivating surveys and a list of Web engineering resources in chapters on - Web engineering: introduction and perspectives - Web-based system development: process and methodology - Managing information on the Web - Development tools, skills, and case studies - Performance, testing, and Web metrices - Web maintenance and reuseThe book will appeal equally to researchers, students, professionals and practitioners in industry interested in developing, maintaining, and using advanced Web-based systems and applications.

Among the many changes brought by the Internet is the emergence of electronic commerce over the Web. E-commerce activities, such as the online exchange of information, services, and products, are opening up completely new opportunities for business, at new levels of productivity and profitability. In parallel with the emergence of e-commerce, intelligent software agents as entities capable of independent action in open, unpredictable environments have matured into a promising new technology. Quite naturally, e-commerce agents hold great promise for exploiting the Internet's full potential as an electronic marketplace. The 20 coherently written chapters in this book by leading researchers and professionals present the state of the art in agent-mediated e-commerce. Researchers, professionals, and advanced students interested in e-commerce or agent technology will find this book an indispensable source of information and reference.

If you are sitting in a basement room without a view - not to mention the bars in front of the windows - and writing a book, then you better have good company. I had the best company you could imagine. Waltraud Hiltl, Katja Markert, Martin Romacker, Klemens Schnattinger, Andreas Klee and I shared very little o?ce space, but plenty of chocolate, co?ee, champagne, and enthusiasm for our research. North German coolness and creativity sprang mostly from my colleagues in the second ?oor. I learned a lot from and laughed a lot with Nobi Br]oker, Susanne (Sue) Schacht, Manfred Klenner, Peter Neuhaus, Stefan Schulz, and Michael Strube. I thank my friend and partner Angela R]osch for motivational and te- nical support and for living together with someone who cares about strange things, works too much and does not improve in any way over the years. Special thanks go to my family who sometimes wondered what was going on when I started talking enthusiastically about "semantics," but they never let wane their encouragement for me. Kornel Marco provided great service by implementing parts of the system presented in this book. Joe Bush helped me polish up the text with his capabilities as an American native speaker. Remaining errors are entirely my fault and due to my lack of diligence. This book would not have seen the light of day without the dissertation grant through the Graduiertenkolleg "Menschliche & Maschinelle Intelligenz" funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)."

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Computer Science Conference, ICSC'99, held in Hong Kong, China, in December 1999.
The 30 revised full papers presented together with 30 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 80 submissions. The book is divided into sections on information filtering, data mining, Web databases, user interfaces, modeling, information retrieval, workflow, applications, active networks, mobility and distributed databases, protocols, distributed systems, information retrieval and filtering, Web technologies, and e-commerce.

Wenn heute uber Informationstechnik in der offentlichen Verwaltung" geschr- ben oder geredet wird, geschieht dies meist im Kontext von Electronic Gove- ment," wobei diese Thematik dann auch noch haufig auf die Bereitstellung el- tronischer Burgerservices reduziert wird. Dabei hat die offentliche Verwaltung selbstverstandlich schon lange vor der Verbreitung des Internets massiven Gebrauch von der Informationstechnik - macht - nur blieb die Auseinandersetzung damit lange Zeit einem sehr kleinen Kreis von Praktikern und Wissenschaftlern vorbehalten. Ursachlich dafur war - niger der Wunsch nach Exklusivitat, sondern vor allem der Umstand, dass sich ausserhalb dieses Kreises kaum jemand fur das Thema erwarmen konnte. Im Zuge von E-Government hat sich diese Situation schlagartig geandert. Die Anzahl der Kongresse, Messen, Umfragen, Benchmarkings usw. zum Thema hat in den letzten Jahren zwar spurbar nachgelassen, doch nach wie vor wird E- Government von denen, die sich damit beschaftigen (und das sind heute noch - mer sehr viel mehr Personen als noch vor zehn Jahren), als zentrales Instrument zur Modernisierung des Behordenapparats angesehen. Inzwischen wissen wir aber auch, dass gerade strukturelle Veranderungen vielfach sehr schleppend verlaufen und die IT im offentlichen Sektor noch immer nicht die Durchschlagskraft" - reicht hat, die ihr vielfach zugeschrieben wurde und die angesichts der technischen Moglichkeiten auch ohne weiteres vorstellbar ist. Fur das eher zogerliche Aufgr- fen der mit moderner IT eroffneten Veranderungsoptionen gibt es zahlreiche Grunde, von denen in den nachfolgenden Beitragen immer wieder die Rede sein wird."

This volume contains the papers selected for presentation at the Seventh Int- national Workshop on Rough Sets, Fuzzy Sets, Data Mining, and Granular-Soft Computing (RSFDGrC 99) held in the Yamaguchi Resort Center, Ube, Y- aguchi, Japan, November 9-11, 1999. The workshop was organized by Inter- tional Rough Set Society, BISC Special Interest Group on Granular Comp- ing (GrC), Polish-JapaneseInstitute of Information Technology, and Yamaguchi University. RSFDGrC 99providedaninternationalforumforsharingoriginalresearch results and practical development experiences among experts in these emerging ?elds.An importantfeatureoftheworkshopwasto stresstheroleofthe integ- tion of intelligent information techniques. That is, to promote a deep fusion of these approaches to AI, Soft Computing, and Database communities in order to solve real world, large, complex problems concerned with uncertainty and fuz- ness. In particular, rough and fuzzy set methods in data mining and granular computing were on display. The total of 89 papers coming from 21 countries and touching a wide spectrum of topics related to both theory and applications were submitted to RSFDGrC 99. Out of them 45 papers were selected for regular presentations and 15 for short presentations. Seven technical sessions were organized, namely: Rough Set Theory and Its Applications; Fuzzy Set Theory and Its Applications; Non-Classical Logic and Approximate Reasoning; Information Granulation and Granular Computing; Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery; Machine Lea- ing; Intelligent Agents and Systems. TheRSFDGrC 99programwasenrichedbyfourinvitedspeakers: Zdzis law Pawlak, Lot? A. Zadeh, Philip Yu, and Setsuo Arikawa, from Soft Computing, Database, and AI communities. A special session on Rough Computing: Fo- dations and Applications was organized by James F. Peters."

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libaries, ECDL'99, held in Paris, France in September 1999. The 26 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 124 submissions. The book is divided in topical sections on image categorization and access, audio and video in digital libraries, information retrieval, user adaptation, knowledge sharing, cross language issues, case studies, and modelling, accessability and connectedness.

Der St. Galler Ansatz zum Business Knowledge Management f hrt Erfahrungen aus einer zunehmenden Anzahl von Praxisprojekten zusammen: Zahlreiche Fallstudien und Anwendungsbeispiele aus Telekommunikation, Finanzdienstleistung, Beratung und Industrie zeigen, wie Unternehmen durch Wissensmanagement sowohl ihre Kundenorientierung und Innovationsgeschwindigkeit als auch ihren Unternehmenswert erh hen. Das daraus abgeleitete Gesamtmodell setzt Wissensmanagement in Beziehung zu neuen Gesch ftsmodellen des Informationszeitalters. Es demonstriert, was neue Instrumente der F hrung und Wissensorganisation zur verbesserten Wissensentwicklung und -nutzung in Gesch ftsprozessen beitragen k nnen. "Knowledge Portals" erweitern die technologischen M glichkeiten des Wissensmanagements. Zwei Beitr ge identifizieren die wesentlichen Komponenten und beschreiben typische Praxisanwendungen von Knowledge Portals.

The 1999 Workshop on Spatio-Temporal Database Management, held in Ed- burgh, Scotland, September 10 11, 1999, brought together leading researchers anddevelopersintheareaofspatio-temporaldatabasestodiscussthestate-- the-art in spatio-temporal research and applications and to understand the new challenges and future research directions in this emerging and rapidly advancing area. The workshop served as a forum for disseminating research and expe- ence in spatio-temporal databases and for maximizing interchange of knowledge among researchers from the established spatial and temporal database com- nities.Theexchangeofresearchideasandresultsnotonlycontributestothe academic arena, but also bene?ts the user and commercial communities. Theseproceedingscontainthe researchpapersselectedforpresentationatthe workshop. The workshop was conceived from the outset to have a general scope within its areaand to be internationalin participation.The callfor papers aimed to attract the highest quality and most up-to-date research contributions from around the world, and the workshop was co-located with VLDB 99, enabling many participants to conveniently attend both events and thereby facilitating the widest possible international participation. The call for papers attracted 30 research papers, which were submitted by authors from 14 countries and ?ve continents, clearly indicating the truly int- nationalnatureoftheemergingareaofspatio-temporaldatabases.Aprogram committee consisting of 25 researchers from four continents conducted four - viewsofeachpaperandselected13outstandingpapersofrpresentationand discussion at the workshop and inclusion in the proceedings. Spatio-temporal databases manage spatially and temporally referenced data. Thepapersincludedinthisvolumecoverdiverseaspectsofthemanagement ofsuchdata, andtheyhavebeenorganizedinto?vegroups: understanding andmanipulatingspatio-temporaldata;integration, exchange, andvisualization; query processing; index evaluation; and constraints and dependencies."

The biennial European Conference on Machine Learning (ECML) series is intended to provide an international forum for the discussion of the latest high quality research results in machine learning and is the major European scienti?c event in the ?eld. The eleventh conference (ECML 2000) held in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain from May 31 to June 2, 2000, has continued this tradition by attracting high quality papers from around the world. Scientists from 21 countries submitted 100 papers to ECML 2000, from which 20 were selected for long oral presentations and 23 for short oral presentations. This selection was based on the recommendations of at least two reviewers for each submitted paper. It is worth noticing that the number of papers reporting applications of machine learning has increased in comparison to past ECML conferences. We believe this fact shows the growing maturity of the ?eld. This volume contains the 43 accepted papers as well as the invited talks by Katharina Morik from the University of Dortmund and Pedro Domingos from the University of Washington at Seattle. In addition, three workshops were jointly organized by ECML 2000 and the European Network of Excellence - net: "Dealing with Structured Data in Machine Learning and Statistics W- stites", "Machine Learning in the New Information Age" , and "Meta-Learning: Building Automatic Advice Strategies for Model Selection and Method Com- nation".

This volume contains the proceedings of the First International Conference on Advances in Information Systems (ADVIS) held in Izmir (Turkey), 25{27 October, 2000. This conference was dedicated to the memory of Professor Esen Ozkarahan. He was great researcher who made an essential contribution to the development of information systems. This conference was organized by the Computer - gineering Department of Dokuz Eylul University of Izmir. This department was established in 1994 by the founding chairman Professor Ozkarahan and there he worked for the last ve years of his live. The main goal of the conference was to bring together researchers from all around the world working in di erent areas of information systems to share new ideas and to represent their latest results. We received 80 submissions from 30 countries. The Program Committee selected 44 papers for presentation at the conference. The invited and accepted contributions cover a large variety of topics: - neral aspects of information systems, data bases, data warehousing, computer networks, Internet technologies, content-based image retrieval, information - trieval, constraint programming and arti cial intelligence. The success of the conference was dependent upon the hard work of a large number of people. We gratefully acknowledge the members of the Program C- mittee who helped to coordinate the process of refereeing all submitted papers. We also thank all the other specialists who reviewed the papers.

The Fourth Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD 2000) was held at the Keihanna-Plaza, Kyoto, Japan, April 18 - 20, 2000. PAKDD 2000 provided an international forum for researchers and applica tion developers to share their original research results and practical development experiences. A wide range of current KDD topics were covered including ma chine learning, databases, statistics, knowledge acquisition, data visualization, knowledge-based systems, soft computing, and high performance computing. It followed the success of PAKDD 97 in Singapore, PAKDD 98 in Austraha, and PAKDD 99 in China by bringing together participants from universities, indus try, and government from all over the world to exchange problems and challenges and to disseminate the recently developed KDD techniques. This PAKDD 2000 proceedings volume addresses both current issues and novel approaches in regards to theory, methodology, and real world application. The technical sessions were organized according to subtopics such as Data Mining Theory, Feature Selection and Transformation, Clustering, Application of Data Mining, Association Rules, Induction, Text Mining, Web and Graph Mining. Of the 116 worldwide submissions, 33 regular papers and 16 short papers were accepted for presentation at the conference and included in this volume. Each submission was critically reviewed by two to four program committee members based on their relevance, originality, quality, and clarity."

This book contains selected papers presented at the First NASA International Conference on Quantum Computing and Quantum Communications, QCQC'98, held in Palm Springs, California, USA in February 1998.As the record of the first large-scale meeting entirely devoted to quantum computing and communications, this book is a unique survey of the state-of-the-art in the area. The 43 carefully reviewed papers are organized in topical sections on entanglement and quantum algorithms, quantum cryptography, quantum copying and quantum information theory, quantum error correction and fault-tolerant quantum computing, and embodiments of quantum computers.

In the past decade visualization established its importance both in scientific research and in real-world applications. In this book 21 research papers and 9 case studies report on the latest results in volume and flow visualization and information visualization. Thus it is a valuable source of information not only for researchers but also for practitioners developing or using visualization applications.

This volume contains the papers selected for presentation at the Third Paci?c- Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD-99)held in the Xiangshan Hotel, Beijing, China, April 26-28, 1999. The conference was sp- sored by Tsinghua University, National Science Foundation of China, Chinese Computer Federation, Toshiba Corporation, and NEC Software Chugoku, Ltd. PAKDD-99 provided an international forum for the sharing of original research results and practical development experiences among researchers and application developers from di?erent KDD-related areas such as machine lea- ing, databases, statistics, knowledge acquisition, data visualization, knowled- based systems, soft computing, and high performance computing. It followed the success of PAKDD-97 held in Singapore in 1997 and PAKDD-98 held in A- tralia in 1998 by bringing together participants from universities, industry, and government. PAKDD-99 encouraged both new theory/methodologies and real world - plications, and covered broad and diverse topics in data mining and knowledge discovery. The technical sessions included: Association Rules Mining; Feature Selection and Generation; Mining in Semi, Un-structured Data; Interestingness, Surprisingness, and Exceptions; Rough Sets, Fuzzy Logic, and Neural Networks; Induction, Classi?cation, and Clustering; Causal Model and Graph-Based Me- ods; Visualization; Agent-Based, and Distributed Data Mining; Advanced Topics and New Methodologies. Of the 158 submissions, we accepted 29 regular papers and 37 short papers for presentation at the conference and for publication in this volume. In addition, over 20 papers were accepted for poster presentation.

These proceedings collect the papers selected for the 2nd International Conf- ence on Interoperating GeographicInformationSystems held in Zur .. ich, Switz- land, 10-12 March, 1999. Interoperabilityhasbecomeanissueinmanyareasofinformationtechnology in the last decade. Computers are used everywhere, and there is an increasing need to share various types of resources such as data and services. This is es- ciallytrueinthecontextofspatialinformation.Spatialdatahavebeencollected, digitized and stored in many di?erent and di?ering repositories. Computer so- ware has been developed to manage, analyse and visualize spatial information. Producing such data and software has become an important business oppor- nity. In everydayspatialinformation handling in manyorganisationsand o?ces, however, interoperability is far from being a matter of fact. Incompatibilities in data formats, software products, spatial conceptions, quality standards, and models of the world continue to create as synchronicity among constituent parts of operating spatial systems. As a follow-upto the ?rst InternationalConference on Interoperating Geographic Information Systems held 1997 in Santa Barbara, California, the Interop'99 tries to provide a scienti? c platform for researchers in this area. Theinternationalprogramcommitteecarefullyselected22papersforpres- tation at the conference and publication in this volume. Additionally, this v- ume contains three invited contributions by Gio Wiederhold, Adrian Cuthbert and Gun .. ther Landgraf. Every paper was sent to three members of the program committee and other experts for review. The reviews resulted in a three-day single-track conference program that left some room for a few half-day tutorials on various topics regarding GIS interoperability.

The field of machine learning and data mining in connection with pattern recognition enjoys growing popularity and attracts many researchers. Automatic pattern recognition systems have proven successful in many applications. The wide use of these systems depends on their ability to adapt to changing environmental conditions and to deal with new objects. This requires learning capabilities on the parts of these systems. The exceptional attraction of learning in pattern recognition lies in the specific data themselves and the different stages at which they get processed in a pattern recognition system. This results a specific branch within the field of machine learning. At the workshop, were presented machine learning approaches for image pre-processing, image segmentation, recognition and interpretation. Machine learning systems were shown on applications such as document analysis and medical image analysis. Many databases are developed that contain multimedia sources such as images, measurement protocols, and text documents. Such systems should be able to retrieve these sources by content. That requires specific retrieval and indexing strategies for images and signals. Higher quality database contents can be achieved if it were possible to mine these databases for their underlying information. Such mining techniques have to consider the specific characteristic of the image sources. The field of mining multimedia databases is just starting out. We hope that our workshop can attract many other researchers to this subject.

Mobile Apps - Programme, die auf Smartphones ausgefuhrt werden - sind derzeit fast nur bei Konsumenten erfolgreich. Ein echtes App-Konzept fur den Business-Markt fehlt nach wie vor. Die Autoren zeigen in dem Band den Weg zu intelligenten Business-Apps fur mobile Geschaftsprozesse, mit deren Hilfe Kunden zeitnah und individuell informiert werden koennen. Die Autoren betrachten Fragen der Anwendung, der Technologie und des Marktes und berucksichtigen auch Cloud-Loesungen.

Database systems of the next generation are likely to be inherently very complex due to the diversity of requirements placed on them. Incorporating active, real time, and temporal virtues in one database system is an arduous effort but is also a commend able one. This book presents the proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Active, Real Time, and Temporal Database Systems (ARTDB 97), held in Como, Milan, in September 1997. The aim of the workshop was to bring researchers together from the active and real time research communities, and to examine the current state of the art in active, real time, and temporal database systems. This book offers a collection of papers presented at the ARTDB 97 workshop. The papers, many of them representing proficient and tenable results, illuminate the feasibility of building database system supporting reactive behavior, while enforcing timeliness and predictability. The book contains nine papers carefully reviewed and accepted by the program committee, three invited papers written by prominent researchers in the field, and two summaries of the panel discussions held at the workshop. The program committee received seventeen submissions, where each submission was reviewed by at least three program committee members. The two panel sessions focused on predictability issues and on practical experience of active, real time, and temporal database systems. The ARTDB 97 workshop was held in cooperation with the IEEE Technical Committees on Real Time Systems and Complexity in Computing, and the ACM Special Interest Group on Manipulation of Data.

Information extraction (IE) is a new technology enabling relevant content to be extracted from textual information available electronically. IE essentially builds on natural language processing and computational linguistics, but it is also closely related to the well established area of information retrieval and involves learning. In concert with other promising intelligent information processing technologies like data mining, intelligent data analysis, text summarization, and information agents, IE plays a crucial role in dealing with the vast amounts of information accessible electronically, for example from the Internet. The book is based on the Second International School on Information Extraction, SCIE-99, held in Frascati near Rome, Italy in June/July 1999.

EDBT 2000 is the seventh conference in a series dedicated to the advancement of database technology. This year's conference special theme, \Connect Millions of Users and Data Sources," underscores the importance of databases for the information age that is dawning with the new millennium. The importance - rives not just from the observation that the information age essentially rests on theconvergenceofcommunications, computing, andstorage.Equallyimportant, many of the concepts and techniques underlying the success of databasesystems have independent meaning and impact for today's distributed information s- tems. The papers in the volume should also be seen in this light. The EDBT 2000 conference program includes 30 research papers selected by the program committee out of 187 submissions, covering advances in research, development, and applications of databases. The conference program also - cludes six industry andapplications papers, a panel discussion, six tutorials, and several software demonstrations. The conference features three distinguished - vited speakers: Ashish Gupta discusses database issues in electronic commerce, Stefano Ceri addresses the impact and challenges of XML on databases, and Andreas Reuter shares his views on new perspectives on database technology. The technical contributions presented at the EDBT 2000 conference are colle- ed and preserved in this volume that we are pleased to present to you with the expectation that it will serve as a valuable research and reference tool in your professional life.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third European Conference on Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases, PKDD'99, held in Prague, Czech Republic in September 1999.
The 28 revised full papers and 48 poster presentations were carefully reviewed and selected from 106 full papers submitted. The papers are organized in topical sections on time series, applications, taxonomies and partitions, logic methods, distributed and multirelational databases, text mining and feature selection, rules and induction, and interesting and unusual issues.

The biennial International Conference on Case-Based Reasoning (ICCBR) - ries, which began in Sesimbra, Portugal, in 1995, was intended to provide an international forum for the best fundamental and applied research in case-based reasoning (CBR). It was hoped that such a forum would encourage the g- wth and rigor of the eld and overcome the previous tendency toward isolated national CBR communities. The foresight of the original ICCBR organizers has been rewarded by the growth of a vigorous and cosmopolitan CBR community. CBR is now widely recognized as a powerful and important computational technique for a wide range of practical applications. By promoting an exchange of ideas among CBR researchers from across the globe, the ICCBR series has facilitated the broader acceptance and use of CBR. ICCBR-99 has continued this tradition by attracting high-quality research and applications papers from around the world. Researchers from 21 countries submitted 80 papers to ICCBR-99. From these submissions, 17 papers were selected for long oral presentation, 7 were accepted for short oral presentation, and 19 papers were accepted as posters. This volume sets forth these 43 papers, which contain both mature work and innovative new ideas.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Symposium on Foundations of Information and Knowledge Systems, FoIKS 2000, held in Burg, Germany, in February 2000.The 14 revised full papers and four short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 45 submissions. Among the topics addressed are logical foundations and semantics of datamodels, dependency theory, integrity and security, temporal aspects, foundations of information systems design including Web-based information services, and query languages and optimization.

Formanyyearstheintersectionofcomputing anddataanalysiscontainedme- based statistics packages and not much else. Recently, statisticians have - braced computing, computer scientists have started using statistical theories and methods, and researchers in all corners have invented algorithms to nd structure in vast online datasets. Data analysts now have access to tools for exploratory data analysis, decision tree induction, causal induction, function - timation, constructingcustomizedreferencedistributions, andvisualization, and thereareintelligentassistantsto adviseonmatters ofdesignandanalysis.There aretoolsfortraditional, relativelysmallsamples, andalsoforenormousdatasets. In all, the scope for probing data in new and penetrating ways has never been so exciting. The IDA-99 conference brings together a wide variety of researchers c- cerned with extracting knowledge from data, including people from statistics, machine learning, neural networks, computer science, pattern recognition, da- base management, and other areas.The strategiesadopted by people from these areas are often di erent, and a synergy results if this is recognized. The IDA series of conferences is intended to stimulate interaction between these di erent areas, sothatmorepowerfultoolsemergeforextractingknowledgefromdataand a better understanding is developed of the process of intelligent data analysis. The result is a conference that has a clear focus (one application area: intelligent data analysis) and a broad scope (many di erent methods and techn