Semantic Web Services for Web Databases introduces an end-to-end framework for querying Web databases using novel Web service querying techniques. This includes a detailed framework for the query infrastructure for Web databases and services. Case studies are covered in the last section of this book. Semantic Web Services For Web Databases is designed for practitioners and researchers focused on service-oriented computing and Web databases.

"Power SAS: A Survival Guide" is designed to provide the millions of SAS users with the largest and most comprehensive collection of SAS tips and techniques ever offered. Kirk Lafler is an Internet and software consultant with 25 years of experience providing clients around the world with innovative technical solutions and training. Kirk's tips will help you leverage features of SAS that even the most experienced SAS users may not know.

Whether you read it cover to cover, browse through it in your free time, or use it as a reference by looking up pertinent tips, this book is an invaluable self-help resource for working smarter, and for troubleshooting and resolving SAS problems and errors. The book's organization makes it easy for SAS users of all experience levelsprogrammers, statisticians, database programmers and administrators, technical managers, technical support staff, and studentsto find what they need. The nine chapters cover SAS basics, data access, data step programming, data manipulation, data management, data presentation, efficiency and performance, configuration and support, and SAS 9.

Learn, prepare, and practice for the Project Management Professional (PMP)® Exam success with this Cert Guide from Pearson IT Certification, a leader in IT Certification learning. Master PMP exam topics Assess your knowledge with chapter-ending quizzes Review key concepts with exam preparation tasks Practice with realistic exam questions Project Management Professional (PMP)® Exam Cert Guide is a best-of-breed exam study guide. Author Gregory M. Horine, and author and expert instructor Asad Haque share preparation hints and test-taking tips, helping you identify areas of weakness and improve both your conceptual knowledge and hands-on skills. Material is presented in a concise manner, focusing on increasing your understanding and retention of exam topics. The book presents you with an organized test preparation routine through the use of proven series elements and techniques. Exam topic lists make referencing easy. Chapter-ending Exam Preparation Tasks help you drill on key concepts you must know thoroughly. Review questions help you assess your knowledge, and a final preparation chapter guides you through tools and resources to help you craft your final study plan. The companion website contains the powerful Pearson Test Prep practice test software, complete with hundreds of exam-realistic questions. The assessment engine offers you a wealth of customization options and reporting features, laying out a complete assessment of your knowledge to help you focus your study where it is needed most. Well regarded for its level of detail, assessment features, and challenging review questions and exercises, this study guide helps you master the concepts and techniques that will enable you to succeed on the exam the first time. This book will prepare you for the PMP® exam, enabling you to Understand the key elements of the PMBOK® Guide that are critical for exam success Learn PMI’s approach to project management Streamline your exam preparations via exam insights, tips, and study strategies Improve your exam readiness with a clear understanding of test-taking strategies and PMP exam question types and scenarios Understand how to plan and close projects according to PMI guidelines Master the differences between predictive, agile, and hybrid project approaches Clarify the differences between the roles of the predictive project manager and the agile team facilitator Understand how to collaborate, engage, and motivate teams and stakeholders for successful completion of the project

Estimation of Distribution Algorithms: A New Tool for Evolutionary Computation is devoted to a new paradigm for evolutionary computation, named estimation of distribution algorithms (EDAs). This new class of algorithms generalizes genetic algorithms by replacing the crossover and mutation operators with learning and sampling from the probability distribution of the best individuals of the population at each iteration of the algorithm. Working in such a way, the relationships between the variables involved in the problem domain are explicitly and effectively captured and exploited. This text constitutes the first compilation and review of the techniques and applications of this new tool for performing evolutionary computation. Estimation of Distribution Algorithms: A New Tool for Evolutionary Computation is clearly divided into three parts. Part I is dedicated to the foundations of EDAs. In this part, after introducing some probabilistic graphical models - Bayesian and Gaussian networks - a review of existing EDA approaches is presented, as well as some new methods based on more flexible probabilistic graphical models. A mathematical modeling of discrete EDAs is also presented. Part II covers several applications of EDAs in some classical optimization problems: the travelling salesman problem, the job scheduling problem, and the knapsack problem. EDAs are also applied to the optimization of some well-known combinatorial and continuous functions. Part III presents the application of EDAs to solve some problems that arise in the machine learning field: feature subset selection, feature weighting in K-NN classifiers, rule induction, partial abductive inference in Bayesian networks, partitional clustering, and the search for optimal weights in artificial neural networks. Estimation of Distribution Algorithms: A New Tool for Evolutionary Computation is a useful and interesting tool for researchers working in the field of evolutionary computation and for engineers who face real-world optimization problems. This book may also be used by graduate students and researchers in computer science. ... I urge those who are interested in EDAs to study this well-crafted book today.' David E. Goldberg, University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana.

Much of the world's advanced data processing applications are now dependant on eXtensible Markup Language (XML), from publishing to medical information storage. Therefore, XML has become a de facto standard for data exchange and representation on the World Wide Web and in daily life. Applications and Structures in XML Processing: Label Streams, Semantics Utilization and Data Query Technologies reflects the significant research results and latest findings of scholars' worldwide, working to explore and expand the role of XML. This collection represents an understanding of XML processing technologies in connection with both advanced applications and the latest XML processing technologies that is of primary importance. It provides the opportunity to understand topics in detail and discover XML research at a comprehensive level.

This edited book is dedicated to Professor N. U. Ahmed, a leading scholar and a renowned researcher in optimal control and optimization on the occasion of his retirement from the Department of Electrical Engineering at University of Ottawa in 1999. The contributions of this volume are in the areas of optimal control, non linear optimization and optimization applications. They are mainly the im proved and expanded versions of the papers selected from those presented in two special sessions of two international conferences. The first special session is Optimization Methods, which was organized by K. L. Teo and X. Q. Yang for the International Conference on Optimization and Variational Inequality, the City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, 1998. The other one is Optimal Control, which was organized byK. Teo and L. Caccetta for the Dynamic Control Congress, Ottawa, 1999. This volume is divided into three parts: Optimal Control; Optimization Methods; and Applications. The Optimal Control part is concerned with com putational methods, modeling and nonlinear systems. Three computational methods for solving optimal control problems are presented: (i) a regularization method for computing ill-conditioned optimal control problems, (ii) penalty function methods that appropriately handle final state equality constraints, and (iii) a multilevel optimization approach for the numerical solution of opti mal control problems. In the fourth paper, the worst-case optimal regulation involving linear time varying systems is formulated as a minimax optimal con trol problem."

This volume contains several surveys focused on the ideas of approximate solutions, well-posedness and stability of problems in scalar and vector optimization, game theory and calculus of variations. These concepts are of particular interest in many fields of mathematics. The idea of stability goes back at least to J. Hadamard who introduced it in the setting of differential equations; the concept of well-posedness for minimum problems is more recent (the mid-sixties) and originates with A.N. Tykhonov. It turns out that there are connections between the two properties in the sense that a well-posed problem which, at least in principle, is "easy to solve," has a solution set that does not vary too much under perturbation of the data of the problem, i.e. it is "stable." These themes have been studied in depth for minimum problems and now we have a general picture of the related phenomena in this case. But, of course, the same concepts can be studied in other more complicated situations as, e.g. vector optimization, game theory and variational inequalities. Let us mention that in several of these new areas there is not even a unique idea of what should be called approximate solution, and the latter is at the basis of the definition of well posed problem."

Rules represent a simplified means of programming, congruent with our understanding of human brain constructs. With the advent of business rules management systems, it has been possible to introduce rule-based programming to nonprogrammers, allowing them to map expert intent into code in applications such as fraud detection, financial transactions, healthcare, retail, and marketing. However, a remaining concern is the quality, safety, and reliability of the resulting programs. This book is on business rules programs, that is, rule programs as handled in business rules management systems. Its conceptual contribution is to present the foundation for treating business rules as a topic of scientific investigation in semantics and program verification, while its technical contribution is to present an approach to the formal verification of business rules programs. The author proposes a method for proving correctness properties for a business rules program in a compositional way, meaning that the proof of a correctness property for a program is built up from correctness properties for the individual rules-thus bridging a gap between the intuitive understanding of rules and the formal semantics of rule programs. With this approach the author enables rule authors and tool developers to understand, express formally, and prove properties of the execution behavior of business rules programs. This work will be of interest to practitioners and researchers in the areas of program verification, enterprise computing, database management, and artificial intelligence.

At present, there is a general consensus on the nature of learning programming, but there are different opinions on what forms an effective environment for it. It is generally recognized that the development of a mental model is a formidable task for the student and that learning programming is a complex activity that depends heavily on metacognitive skills. This book, based on a NATO workshop, presents both pure cognitive models and experimental learning environments, and discusses what characteristics can make a learning model effective, especially in relation to the learning environment (natural or computerized). The papers cover cognitive models related to different aspects of programming, classes of learners, and types of environment, and are organized in three groups: theoretical and empirical studies on understanding programming, environments for learning programming, and learning programming in school environments. Comprehension, design, construction, testing, debugging, and verification are recognized as interdependent skills, which require complicated analysis and may develop independently, and indifferent orders, in novices. This book shows that there is unlikely to be asingle path from novice to expert and that the structure of the final product (the program) may not constrain the process by which it comes into being as much as some would advocate.

Working with Sound is an exploration of the ever-changing working practices of audio development in the era of hybrid collaboration in the games industry. Through learnings from the pre-pandemic remote and isolated worlds of audio work, sound designers, composers and dialogue designers find themselves equipped uniquely to thrive in the hybrid, remote, and studio-based realms of today's fast-evolving working landscapes. With unique insights into navigating the worlds of isolation and collaboration, this book explores ways of thinking and working in this world, equipping the reader with inspiration to sustainably tackle the many stages of the development process. Working with Sound is an essential guide for professionals working in dynamic audio teams of all sizes, as well as the designers, producers, artists, animators and programmers who collaborate closely with their colleagues working on game audio and sound.

Embedded computing systems play an important and complex role in the functionality of electronic devices. With our daily routines becoming more reliant on electronics for personal and professional use, the understanding of these computing systems is crucial. Embedded Computing Systems: Applications, Optimization, and Advanced Design brings together theoretical and technical concepts of intelligent embedded control systems and their use in hardware and software architectures. By highlighting formal modeling, execution models, and optimal implementations, this reference source is essential for experts, researchers, and technical supporters in the industry and academia.

The launch of Microsoft s Kinect, the first high-resolution depth-sensing camera for the consumer market, generated considerable excitement not only among computer gamers, but also within the global community of computer vision researchers.

The potential of consumer depth cameras extends well beyond entertainment and gaming, to real-world commercial applications such virtual fitting rooms, training for athletes, and assistance for the elderly. This authoritative text/reference reviews the scope and impact of this rapidly growing field, describing the most promising Kinect-based research activities, discussing significant current challenges, and showcasing exciting applications.

Topics and features: presents contributions from an international selection of preeminent authorities in their fields, from both academic and corporate research; addresses the classic problem of multi-view geometry of how to correlate images from different viewpoints to simultaneously estimate camera poses and world points; examines human pose estimation using video-rate depth images for gaming, motion capture, 3D human body scans, and hand pose recognition for sign language parsing; provides a review of approaches to various recognition problems, including category and instance learning of objects, and human activity recognition; with a Foreword by Dr. Jamie Shotton of Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK.

This broad-ranging overview is a must-read for researchers and graduate students of computer vision and robotics wishing to learn more about the state of the art of this increasingly hot topic."

As information technologies become increasingly distributed and accessible to larger number of people and as commercial and government organizations are challenged to scale their applications and services to larger market shares, while reducing costs, there is demand for software methodologies and appli- tions to provide the following features: Richer application end-to-end functionality; Reduction of human involvement in the design and deployment of the software; Flexibility of software behaviour; and Reuse and composition of existing software applications and systems in novel or adaptive ways. When designing new distributed software systems, the above broad requi- ments and their translation into implementations are typically addressed by partial complementarities and overlapping technologies and this situation gives rise to significant software engineering challenges. Some of the challenges that may arise are: determining the components that the distributed applications should contain, organizing the application components, and determining the assumptions that one needs to make in order to implement distributed scalable and flexible applications, etc.

A definitive reference for resolving the dilemma of application testing and debugging--one of the biggest time commitments in a programmer's daily routine--this book rescues readers from substandard application testing practices. It commences with several chapters that provide an overview the debugger's basic features, then covers common debugging scenarios.

The software product line strategy has enabled many organizations to improve productivity, reduce time-to-market, and address both mass- and niche markets. A successful product line organization achieves strategic levels of architectural reuse.

The topics in this book cover research related to the most important practices in a product line organization. The contributions provide experience-based knowledge about the domain and application engineering, the modeling and management of variability, and the design and use of tools to support the management of product line related knowledge. Kakola and Duenas have grouped them into five parts corresponding to the main areas of software product line engineering: product line management, product line requirements engineering, product line architecture, product line testing, and specific product line engineering issues. They ensured maximum coherence and cross-referencing throughout the book, imposing a common terminology and carefully integrating all chapters. The result is a valuable and enduring resource for researchers in both industry and academia who will also find many pointers for future research and implementation strategies. In addition, systems and software professionals, and technology managers aspiring to fully leverage the product line strategy will also benefit from many pertinent development details.

"This volume is a valuable resource for researchers wishing to move the product line strategy forward and for those charged with translating state-of-the-art ideas into state-of-the-practice processes and activities."

From the Foreword by John D. McGregor, Clemson University, USA

This book is concerned with topological and differential properties of multivalued mappings and marginal functions. Beside this applica- tions to the sensitivity analysis of optimization problems, in particular nonlinear programming problems with perturbations, are studied. The elaborated methods are primarily obtained by theories and concepts of two former Soviet Union researchers, Demyanov and Rubinov. Con- sequently, a significant part of the presented results have never been published in English before. Based on the use of directional derivatives as a key tool in studying nonsmooth functions and multifunctions, these results can be considered as a further development of quasidifferential calculus created by Demyanov and Rubinov. In contrast to other research in this field, especially the recent publica- tion by Bonnans and Shapiro, this book analyses properties of marginal functions associated with optimization problems under quite general con- straints defined by means of multivalued mappings. A unified approach to directional differentiability of functions and multifunctions forms the base of the volume.

This book initiates a new digital multimedia standards series. The purpose of the series is to make information about digital multimedia standards readilyavailable. Both tutorial and advanced topics will be covered in the series, often in one book. Our hope is that users will find the series helpful in deciding what standards to support and use while implementors will d- cover a wealth of technical details that help them implement those standards correctly. In today's global economy standards are increasingly important. Yet until a standard is widely used, most of the benefits of standardization are not realized. We hope that standards committee chairpeople will organize and encourage a book in this series devoted to their new standard. This can be a forum to share and preserve some ofthe "why" and "how" that went into the development of the standard and, in the process, assist in the rapid adoption of the standard. Already in production for this series are books titled Digital Video: - troduction to MPEG-2 and Data Compression in Digital Systems.

In a model-based development of software systems different views on a system are elaborated using appropriate modeling languages and techniques. Because of the unavoidable heterogeneity of the viewpoint models, a semantic integration is required, to establish the correspondences of the models and allow checking of their relative consistency.

The integration approach introduced in this book is based on a common semantic domain of abstract systems, their composition and development. Its applicability is shown through semantic interpretations and compositional comparisons of different specification approaches. These range from formal specification techniques like process calculi, Petri nets and rule-based formalisms to semiformal software modeling languages like those in the UML family.

SMIL 3.0: Multimedia for the Web, Mobile Devices and Daisy Talking Books is a revised introduction to - and resource guide for - the W3C SMIL language. It covers all aspects of the SMIL specification and covers all of SMIL's implem- tation profiles, from the desktop through the world of mobile SMIL devices. Based on the first version of the book, which covered SMIL 2.0, this edition has been updated with information from the past two releases of the SMIL l- guage. We have benefitted from comments and suggestions from many readers of the first edition, and have produced what we feel is the most comprehensive guide to SMIL available anywhere. Motivation for this Book While we were working on various phases of the SMIL recommendations, it became clear to us that the richness of the SMIL language could easily ov- whelm many Web authors and designers. In the 500+ pages that the SYMM working group needed to describe the 30+ SMIL elements and the 150+ SMIL attributes, there was not much room for background information or extensive examples. The focus of the specification was on implementation aspects of the SMIL language, not on the rationale or the potential uses of SMIL's declarative power.

The emergence of Web 2.0 has triggered a trend towards global online social interactions and has brought sociology into the global interactive picture, creating educational issues relating to individual and social learning for the internalization and externalization of information and knowledge. ""Educational Social Software for Context-Aware Learning: Collaborative Methods and Human Interaction"" examines socio-cultural elements in educational computing focused on design and theory where learning and setting are intertwined. This advanced publication addresses real-life case studies where evaluations have been applied and validated in computational systems.

IFIP's Working Group 2.7(13.4)* has, since its establishment in 1974, con centrated on the software problems of user interfaces. From its original interest in operating systems interfaces the group has gradually shifted em phasis towards the development of interactive systems. The group has orga nized a number of international working conferences on interactive software technology, the proceedings of which have contributed to the accumulated knowledge in the field. The current title of the Working Group is 'User Interface Engineering', with the aim of investigating the nature, concepts, and construction of user interfaces for software systems. The scope of work involved is: - to increase understanding of the development of interactive systems; - to provide a framework for reasoning about interactive systems; - to provide engineering models for their development. This report addresses all three aspects of the scope, as further described below. In 1986 the working group published a report (Beech, 1986) with an object-oriented reference model for describing the components of operating systems interfaces. The modelwas implementation oriented and built on an object concept and the notion of interaction as consisting of commands and responses. Through working with that model the group addressed a number of issues, such as multi-media and multi-modal interfaces, customizable in terfaces, and history logging. However, a conclusion was reached that many software design considerations and principles are independent of implemen tation models, but do depend on the nature of the interaction process."

This book proposes a purely classical first-order logical approach to the theory of programming. The authors, leading members of the famous "Hungarian school," use this approach to give a unified and systematic presentation of the theory. This approach provides formal methods and tools for reasoning about computer programs and programming languages by allowing the syntactic and semantic characterization of programs, the description of program properties, and ways to check whether a given program satisfies certain properties. The basic methods are logical extension, inductive definition and their combination, all of which admit an appropriate first-order representation of data and time. The framework proposed by the authors allows the investigation and development of different programming theories and logics from a unified point of view. Dynamic and temporal logics, for example, are investigated and compared with respect to their expressive and proof-theoretic powers. The book should appeal to both theoretical researchers and students. For researchers in computer science the book provides a coherent presentation of a new approach which permits the solution of various problems in programming theory in a unified manner by the use of first-order logical tools. The book may serve as a basis for graduate courses in programming theory and logic as it covers all important questions arising between the theory of computation and formal descriptive languages and presents an appropriate derivation system.