During the 21st century business environments have become more complex and dynamic than ever before. Companies operate in a world of change influenced by globalisation, volatile markets, legal changes and technical progress. As a result, they have to handle growing volumes of data and therefore require fast storage, reliable data access, intelligent retrieval of information and automated decision-making mechanisms, all provided at the highest level of service quality. Successful enterprises are aware of these challenges and efficiently respond to the dynamic environment in which their business operates. Business Intelligence (BI) and Performance Management (PM) offer solutions to these challenges and provide techniques to enable effective business change. The important aspects of both topics are discussed within this state-of-the-art volume. It covers the strategic support, business applications, methodologies and technologies from the field, and explores the benefits, issues and challenges of each. Issues are analysed from many different perspectives, ranging from strategic management to data technologies, and the different subjects are complimented and illustrated by numerous examples of industrial applications. Contributions are authored by leading academics and practitioners representing various universities, research centres and companies worldwide. Their experience covers multiple disciplines and industries, including finance, construction, logistics, and public services, amongst others. Business Intelligence and Performance Management is a valuable source of reference for graduates approaching MSc or PhD programs and for professionals in industry researching in the fields of BI and PM for industrial application.

This is a rigorous and complete textbook for a first course on information retrieval from the computer science perspective. It provides an up-to-date student oriented treatment of information retrieval including extensive coverage of new topics such as web retrieval, web crawling, open source search engines and user interfaces.

From parsing to indexing, clustering to classification, retrieval to ranking, and user feedback to retrieval evaluation, all of the most important concepts are carefully introduced and exemplified. The contents and structure of the book have been carefully designed by the two main authors, with individual contributions coming from leading international authorities in the field, including Yoelle Maarek, Senior Director of Yahoo Research Israel; Dulce Ponceleon IBM Research; and Malcolm Slaney, Yahoo Research USA.

This completely reorganized, revised and enlarged second edition of "Modern Information Retrieval" contains many new chapters and double the number of pages and bibliographic references of the first edition, and a companion website www.mir2ed.org with teaching material. It will prove invaluable to students, professors, researchers, practitioners, and scholars of this fascinating field of information retrieval.

Introduction The International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) is a non-profit umbrella organization for national societies working in the field of information processing. It was founded in 1960 under the auspices of UNESCO. It is organized into several technical c- mittees. This book represents the proceedings of the 2008 conference of technical committee 8 (TC8), which covers the field of infor- tion systems. TC8 aims to promote and encourage the advancement of research and practice of concepts, methods, techniques and issues related to information systems in organisations. TC8 has established eight working groups covering the following areas: design and evaluation of information systems; the interaction of information systems and the organization; decision support systems; e-business information systems: multi-disciplinary research and practice; inf- mation systems in public administration; smart cards, technology, applications and methods; and enterprise information systems. Further details of the technical committee and its working groups can be found on our website (ifiptc8. dsi. uminho. pt). This conference was part of IFIP's World Computer Congress in Milan, Italy which took place 7-10 September 2008. The occasion celebrated the 32nd anniversary of IFIP TC8. The call for papers invited researchers, educators, and practitioners to submit papers and panel proposals that advance concepts, methods, techniques, tools, issues, education, and practice of information systems in organi- tions. Thirty one submissions were received.

The objective of this book is to introduce the basic concepts of big data computing and then to describe the total solution of big data problems using HPCC, an open-source computing platform. The book comprises 15 chapters broken into three parts. The first part, Big Data Technologies, includes introductions to big data concepts and techniques; big data analytics; and visualization and learning techniques. The second part, LexisNexis Risk Solution to Big Data, focuses on specific technologies and techniques developed at LexisNexis to solve critical problems that use big data analytics. It covers the open source High Performance Computing Cluster (HPCC Systems (R)) platform and its architecture, as well as parallel data languages ECL and KEL, developed to effectively solve big data problems. The third part, Big Data Applications, describes various data intensive applications solved on HPCC Systems. It includes applications such as cyber security, social network analytics including fraud, Ebola spread modeling using big data analytics, unsupervised learning, and image classification. The book is intended for a wide variety of people including researchers, scientists, programmers, engineers, designers, developers, educators, and students. This book can also be beneficial for business managers, entrepreneurs, and investors.

Details recent research in areas such as ontology design for information integration, metadata generation and management, and representation and management of distributed ontologies.

Provides decision support on the use of novel technologies, information about potential problems, and guidelines for the successful application of existing technologies.

This invaluable reference offers the most comprehensive introduction available to the concepts of multisensor data fusion. It introduces key algorithms, provides advice on their utilization, and raises issues associated with their implementation. With a diverse set of mathematical and heuristic techniques for combining data from multiple sources, the book shows how to implement a data fusion system, describes the process for algorithm selection, functional architectures and requirements for ancillary software, and illustrates man-machine interface requirements an database issues.

The present volume gathers together the talks presented at the second colloquim on the Future Professional Communication in Astronomy (FPCA II), held at Harvard University (Cambridge, MA) on 13-14 April 2010. This meeting provided a forum for editors, publishers, scientists, librarians and officers of learned societies to discuss the future of the field. The program included talks from leading researchers and practitioners and drew a crowd of approximately 50 attendees from 10 countries. These proceedings contain contributions from invited and contributed talks from leaders in the field, touching on a number of topics. Among them: - The role of disciplinary repositories such as ADS and arXiv in astronomy and the physical sciences; - Current status and future of Open Access Publishing models and their impact on astronomy and astrophysics publishing; - Emerging trends in scientific article publishing: semantic annotations, multimedia content, links to data products hosted by astrophysics archives; - Novel approaches to the evaluation of facilities and projects based on bibliometric indicators; - Impact of Government mandates, Privacy laws, and Intellectual Property Rights on the evolving digital publishing environment in astronomy; - Communicating astronomy to the public: the experience of the International Year of Astronomy 2009.

Researchers in data management have recently recognized the importance of a new class of data-intensive applications that requires managing data streams, i.e., data composed of continuous, real-time sequence of items. Streaming applications pose new and interesting challenges for data management systems. Such application domains require queries to be evaluated continuously as opposed to the one time evaluation of a query for traditional applications. Streaming data sets grow continuously and queries must be evaluated on such unbounded data sets. These, as well as other challenges, require a major rethink of almost all aspects of traditional database management systems to support streaming applications.

Stream Data Management comprises eight invited chapters by researchers active in stream data management. The collected chapters provide exposition of algorithms, languages, as well as systems proposed and implemented for managing streaming data.

Stream Data Management is designed to appeal to researchers or practitioners already involved in stream data management, as well as to those starting out in this area. This book is also suitable for graduate students in computer science interested in learning about stream data management.

This book presents the proceedings of the Working Conference on the societal and organizational implications for information systems of social inclusion. The contributed papers explore technology design and use in organizations, and consider the processes that engender social exclusion along with the issues that derive from it. The conference, sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing Working Group 8.2, was held in Limerick, Ireland, in July, 2006.

Linking Government Data provides a practical approach to addressing common information management issues. The approaches taken are based on international standards of the World Wide Web Consortium. Linking Government Data gives both the costs and benefits of using linked data techniques with government data; describes how agencies can fulfill their missions with less cost; and recommends how intra-agency culture must change to allow public presentation of linked data. Case studies from early adopters of linked data approaches in international governments are presented in the last section of the book. Linking Government Data is designed as a professional book for those working in Semantic Web research and standards development, and for early adopters of Semantic Web standards and techniques. Enterprise architects, project managers and application developers in commercial, not-for-profit and government organizations concerned with scalability, flexibility and robustness of information management systems will also find this book valuable. Students focused on computer science and business management will also find value in this book.

Motivation for the Book This book aims to describe a comprehensive methodology for service-oriented inf- mation systems planning, considered in particular, in eGovernment initiatives. The methodology is based on the research results produced by the Italian project "eG- ernment for Mediterranean Countries (eG4M)," granted by the Italian Ministry of University and Research from 2005 to 2008. The concept of service is at the center of the book. The methodology is focused on quality of services as a key factor for eGovernment initiatives. Since its grou- ing is in a project whose goal has been to develop a methodology for eGove- ment in Mediterranean countries it is called eG4M. Furthermore, eG4M aims at encompassing the relationships existing between ICT technologies and social c- texts of service provision, organizational issues, and juridical framework, looking at ICT technologies more as a means than an end. eG4M satis es a real need of constituencies and stakeholders involved in eGovernment projects, con rmed in the eG4M experimentations and in previous preliminary experiences in the Italian P- lic Administrations. A structured process is needed that provides a clear perspective on the different facets that eGovernment initiatives usually have to challenge and disciplines the complex set of decisions to be taken. The available approaches to eGovernment usually provide only one perspective to public managers and local authorities on the domain of intervention, either te- nological, organizational, legal, economic, or social.

This book presents a review of traditional context-aware computing research, identifies its limitations in developing social context-aware pervasive systems, and introduces a new technology framework to address these limitations. Thus, this book provides a good reference for developments in context-aware computing and pervasive social computing. It examines the emerging area of pervasive social computing, which is a novel collective paradigm derived from pervasive computing, social media, social networking, social signal processing and multimodal human-computer interaction. This book offers a novel approach to model, represent, reason about and manage different types of social context. It shows how users' social context information can be acquired from different online social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google Calendar. It further presents the use of social context information in developing innovative smart mobile applications to assist users in their daily life. The mix of both theoretical and applied research results makes this book attractive to a variety of readers from both academia and industry. This book provides a new platform for implementing different types of socially-aware mobile applications. The platform hides the complexity of managing social context, and thus provides essential support to application developers for the development of socially-aware applications. The book contains detailed descriptions of how the underlying platform has been implemented using available technologies such as ontology and rule engines, and how this platform can be used to develop socially-aware mobile applications using two exemplar applications. The book also presents evaluations of the proposed platform and applications using real-world data from Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Therefore, this book is a syndication of scientific research with practical industrial applications, making it useful to researchers as well as to software engineers.

This book proposes a novel approach to classification, discusses its myriad advantages, and outlines how such an approach to classification can best be pursued. It encourages a collaborative effort toward the detailed development of such a classification. This book is motivated by the increased importance of interdisciplinary scholarship in the academy, and the widely perceived shortcomings of existing knowledge organization schemes in serving interdisciplinary scholarship. It is designed for scholars of classification research, knowledge organization, the digital environment, and interdisciplinarity itself. The approach recommended blends a general classification with domain-specific classification practices. The book reaches a set of very strong conclusions: -Existing classification systems serve interdisciplinary research and teaching poorly. -A novel approach to classification, grounded in the phenomena studied rather than disciplines, would serve interdisciplinary scholarship much better. It would also have advantages for disciplinary scholarship. The productivity of scholarship would thus be increased. -This novel approach is entirely feasible. Various concerns that might be raised can each be addressed. The broad outlines of what a new classification would look like are developed. -This new approach might serve as a complement to or a substitute for existing classification systems. -Domain analysis can and should be employed in the pursuit of a general classification. This will be particularly important with respect to interdisciplinary domains. -Though the impetus for this novel approach comes from interdisciplinarity, it is also better suited to the needs of the Semantic Web, and a digital environment more generally. Though the primary focus of the book is on classification systems, most chapters also address how the analysis could be extended to thesauri and ontologies. The possibility of a universal thesaurus is explored. The classification proposed has many of the advantages sought in ontologies for the Semantic Web. The book is therefore of interest to scholars working in these areas as well.

DATA ENGINEERING: Mining, Information, and Intelligence describes applied research aimed at the task of collecting data and distilling useful information from that data. Most of the work presented emanates from research completed through collaborations between Acxiom Corporation and its academic research partners under the aegis of the Acxiom Laboratory for Applied Research (ALAR). Chapters are roughly ordered to follow the logical sequence of the transformation of data from raw input data streams to refined information. Four discrete sections cover Data Integration and Information Quality; Grid Computing; Data Mining; and Visualization. Additionally, there are exercises at the end of each chapter. The primary audience for this book is the broad base of anyone interested in data engineering, whether from academia, market research firms, or business-intelligence companies. The volume is ideally suited for researchers, practitioners, and postgraduate students alike. With its focus on problems arising from industry rather than a basic research perspective, combined with its intelligent organization, extensive references, and subject and author indices, it can serve the academic, research, and industrial audiences.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the next big challenge for the research community. The IPv6 over low power wireless personal area network (6LoWPAN) protocol stack is considered a key part of the IoT. In 6LoWPAN networks, heavy network traffic causes congestion which significantly degrades network performance and impacts on quality of service aspects. This book presents a concrete, solid and logically ordered work on congestion control for 6LoWPAN networks as a step toward successful implementation of the IoT and supporting the IoT application requirements. The book addresses the congestion control issue in 6LoWPAN networks and presents a comprehensive literature review on congestion control for WSNs and 6LoWPAN networks. An extensive congestion analysis and assessment for 6LoWPAN networks is explored through analytical modelling, simulations and real experiments. A number of congestion control mechanisms and algorithms are proposed to mitigate and solve the congestion problem in 6LoWPAN networks by using and utilizing the non-cooperative game theory, multi-attribute decision making and network utility maximization framework. The proposed algorithms are aware of node priorities and application priorities to support the IoT application requirements and improve network performance in terms of throughput, end-to-end delay, energy consumption, number of lost packets and weighted fairness index.

This book discusses challenges and solutions for the required information processing and management within the context of multi-disciplinary engineering of production systems. The authors consider methods, architectures, and technologies applicable in use cases according to the viewpoints of product engineering and production system engineering, and regarding the triangle of (1) product to be produced by a (2) production process executed on (3) a production system resource. With this book industrial production systems engineering researchers will get a better understanding of the challenges and requirements of multi-disciplinary engineering that will guide them in future research and development activities. Engineers and managers from engineering domains will be able to get a better understanding of the benefits and limitations of applicable methods, architectures, and technologies for selected use cases. IT researchers will be enabled to identify research issues related to the development of new methods, architectures, and technologies for multi-disciplinary engineering, pushing forward the current state of the art.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post conference proceedings of the 6th IFIP WG 9.2, 9.6/11.7, 11.4, 11.6/PrimeLife International Summer School, held in Helsingborg, Sweden, in August 2010. The 27 revised papers were carefully selected from numerous submissions during two rounds of reviewing. They are organized in topical sections on terminology, privacy metrics, ethical, social, and legal aspects, data protection and identity management, eID cards and eID interoperability, emerging technologies, privacy for eGovernment and AAL applications, social networks and privacy, privacy policies, and usable privacy.

This book includes 23 papers dealing with the impact of modern information and communication technologies that support a wide variety of communities: local communities, virtual communities, and communities of practice, such as knowledge communities and scientific communities. The volume is the result of the second multidisciplinary "Communities and Technologies Conference," a major event in this emerging research field. The various chapters discuss how communities are affected by technologies, and how understanding of the way that communities function can be used in improving information systems design. This state of the art overview will be of interest to computer and information scientists, social scientists and practitioners alike.

Blockchain Technology Solutions for the Security of IoT-Based Healthcare Systems explores the various benefits and challenges associated with the integration of blockchain with IoT healthcare systems, focusing on designing cognitive-embedded data technologies to aid better decision-making, processing and analysis of large amounts of data collected through IoT. This book series targets the adaptation of decision-making approaches under cognitive computing paradigms to demonstrate how the proposed procedures, as well as big data and Internet of Things (IoT) problems can be handled in practice. Current Internet of Things (IoT) based healthcare systems are incapable of sharing data between platforms in an efficient manner and holding them securely at the logical and physical level. To this end, blockchain technology guarantees a fully autonomous and secure ecosystem by exploiting the combined advantages of smart contracts and global consensus. However, incorporating blockchain technology in IoT healthcare systems is not easy. Centralized networks in their current capacity will be incapable to meet the data storage demands of the incoming surge of IoT based healthcare wearables.

The Handbook provides practitioners, scientists and graduate students with a good overview of basic notions, methods and techniques, as well as important issues and trends across the broad spectrum of data management. In particular, the book covers fundamental topics in the field such as distributed databases, parallel databases, advanced databases, object-oriented databases, advanced transaction management, workflow management, data warehousing, data mining, mobile computing, data integration and the Web. Summing up, the Handbook is a valuable source of information for academics and practitioners who are interested in learning the key ideas in the considered area.

This book highlights practical quantum key distribution systems and research on the implementations of next-generation quantum communication, as well as photonic quantum device technologies. It discusses how the advances in quantum computing and quantum physics have allowed the building, launching and deploying of space exploration systems that are capable of more and more as they become smaller and lighter. It also presents theoretical and experimental research on the potential and limitations of secure communication and computation with quantum devices, and explores how security can be preserved in the presence of a quantum computer, and how to achieve long-distance quantum communication. The development of a real quantum computer is still in the early stages, but a number of research groups have investigated the theoretical possibilities of such computers.

The Handbook of Service Description introduces an in-depth overview of service description efforts. The book also highlights the recent Unified Service Description Language (USDL) in detail and discusses its methods.

The Handbook of Service Description is the normative scientific reference for the upcoming standardization of the Unified Service Description Language (USDL). Complete documentation is included.

The Handbook of Service Description is designed for those working in the service science industry as a reference book. Advanced-level students focused on computer science, engineering and business will also find this book a valuable asset.

Mobile communications and ubiquitous computing generate large volumes of data. Mining this data can produce useful knowledge, yet individual privacy is at risk. This book investigates the various scientific and technological issues of mobility data, open problems, and roadmap. The editors manage a research project called GeoPKDD, Geographic Privacy-Aware Knowledge Discovery and Delivery, and this book relates their findings in 13 chapters covering all related subjects.

The emergence of open access, web technology, and e-publishing has slowly transformed modern libraries into digital libraries. With this variety of technologies utilized, cloud computing and virtual technology has become an advantage for libraries to provide a single efficient system that saves money and time. Cloud Computing and Virtualization Technologies in Libraries highlights the concerns and limitations that need addressed in order to optimize the benefits of cloud computing to the virtualization of libraries. Focusing on the latest innovations and technological advancements, this book is essential for professionals, students, and researchers interested in cloud library management and development in different types of information environments.

Here is a thorough, not-overly-complex introduction to the three technical foundations for multimedia applications across the Internet: communications (principles, technologies and networking); compressive encoding of digital media; and Internet protocol and services. All the contributing systems elements are explained through descriptive text and numerous illustrative figures; the result is a book well-suited toward non-specialists, preferably with technical background, who need well-composed tutorial introductions to the three foundation areas. The text discusses the latest advances in digital audio and video encoding, optical and wireless communications technologies, high-speed access networks, and IP-based media streaming, all crucial enablers of the multimedia Internet.