E-government faces huge challenges in achieving interoperability and integration, taking into account differences in laws, regulations, services, administrative processes and languages across regions and countries. On the other hand, issues like service, data and process integration have been researched by the Semantic Web community for several years now, and in the last two to three years we have witnessed the first applications of semantic technologies in real, operational e-government systems in both Europe and the US which address exactly these challenges.

With this book, the editors present the latest research results on how to use semantic technologies in order to improve or even revolutionize the use of ICT in public administration systems. The contributions are organized into three parts: architectures and process integration, ontologies and interoperability, and portals and user interactions. They give a broad overview of how semantic technologies have been applied in different e-government projects funded from the European program for ICT Research and Development, and they cover a wide spectrum of semantic technologies such as development of domain and service ontologies, semantic enhancements of business process models, semantic Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs) based on Semantic Web Services (SWS) frameworks, and ontology-based knowledge management.

In this volume, researchers of Semantic Web technologies will find a wealth of challenging real-world scenarios to stimulate new fields of research, while developers of e-government systems as well as other stakeholders in public administration will appreciate the detailed presentations and discussions of numerous applications in areas such as e-government portals, personalization of Web-based public services, or integration and orchestration of public administration processes.

This book presents innovative solutions utilising informatics to deal with various issues related to the COVID-19 outbreak. The book offers a collection of contemporary research and development on the management of Covid-19 using health data analytics, information exchange, knowledge sharing, the Internet of Things (IoT), and the Internet of Everything (IoE)-based solutions. The book also analyses the implementation, assessment, adoption, and management of these healthcare informatics solutions to manage the pandemic and future epidemics. The book is relevant to researchers, professors, students, and professionals in informatics and related topics.

This book shows digital economy has become one of the most sought out solutions to sustainable development and economic growth of nations. This book discusses the implications of both artificial intelligence and computational intelligence in the digital economy providing a holistic view on AI education, economics, finance, sustainability, ethics, governance, cybersecurity, blockchain, and knowledge management. Unlike other books, this book brings together two important areas, intelligence systems and big data in the digital economy, with special attention given to the opportunities, challenges, for education, business growth, and economic progression of nations. The chapters hereby focus on how societies can take advantage and manage data, as well as the limitations they face due to the complexity of resources in the form of digital data and the intelligence which will support economists, financial managers, engineers, ICT specialists, digital managers, data managers, policymakers, regulators, researchers, academics, students, economic development strategies, and the efforts made by the UN towards achieving their sustainability goals.

Responsive Computing brings together in one place important contributions and state-of-the-art research results in this rapidly advancing area. Responsive Computing serves as an excellent reference, providing insight into some of the most important issues in the field.

This volume is the first (I) of four under the main themes of Digitizing Agriculture and Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). The four volumes cover rapidly developing processes including Sensors (I), Data (II), Decision (III), and Actions (IV). Volumes are related to 'digital transformation" within agricultural production and provision systems, and in the context of Smart Farming Technology and Knowledge-based Agriculture. Content spans broadly from data mining and visualization to big data analytics and decision making, alongside with the sustainability aspects stemming from the digital transformation of farming. The four volumes comprise the outcome of the 12th EFITA Congress, also incorporating chapters that originated from select presentations of the Congress. The focus in this volume is on different aspects of sensors implementation in agricultural production (e.g., types of sensors, parameters monitoring, network types, connectivity, accuracy, reliability, durability, and needs to be covered) and provides variety of information and knowledge in the subject of sensors design, development, and deployment for monitoring agricultural production parameters. The book consists of four (4) Sections. The first section presents an overview on the state-off-the art in sensing technologies applied in agricultural production while the rest of the sections are dedicated to remote sensing, proximal sensing, and wireless sensor networks applications. Topics include: Emerging sensing technologies Soil reflectance spectroscopy LoRa technologies applications in agriculture Wireless sensor networks deployment and applications Combined remote and proximal sensing solutions Crop phenology monitoring Sensors for geophysical properties Combined sensing technologies with geoinformation systems

This book provides an overview of the most recent developments in Internet of Things (IoT) security and data protection. It presents the results of several international research projects addressing this topic from complementary angles. It starts by analyzing the main privacy and security threats on IoT, as well as the evolution of data protection norms, such as the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and their impact on IoT. Through a comprehensive and systematic approach, the contributors present new perspectives on IoT & Cloud Computing security requirements. They discuss the most recent approach to support trusted IoT, including new models of privacy risk assessment, labeling and certification, and contractual tools (such as Privacy PACT). Practical implementations, such as in the European Large Scale Pilots on IoT for Smart Cities (Synchronicity), are presented, explaining how they address security, privacy and data protection. Finally, innovative models to secure IoT systems are presented for the network and end-nodes security, including network threats analysis.

The ability to analyze and understand massive data sets lags far behind the ability to gather and store the data. To meet this challenge, knowledge discovery and data mining (KDD) is growing rapidly as an emerging field. However, no matter how powerful computers are now or will be in the future, KDD researchers and practitioners must consider how to manage ever-growing data which is, ironically, due to the extensive use of computers and ease of data collection with computers. Many different approaches have been used to address the data explosion issue, such as algorithm scale-up and data reduction. Instance, example, or tuple selection pertains to methods or algorithms that select or search for a representative portion of data that can fulfill a KDD task as if the whole data is used. Instance selection is directly related to data reduction and becomes increasingly important in many KDD applications due to the need for processing efficiency and/or storage efficiency. One of the major means of instance selection is sampling whereby a sample is selected for testing and analysis, and randomness is a key element in the process. Instance selection also covers methods that require search. Examples can be found in density estimation (finding the representative instances - data points - for a cluster); boundary hunting (finding the critical instances to form boundaries to differentiate data points of different classes); and data squashing (producing weighted new data with equivalent sufficient statistics). Other important issues related to instance selection extend to unwanted precision, focusing, concept drifts, noise/outlier removal, data smoothing, etc. Instance Selection and Construction for Data Mining brings researchers and practitioners together to report new developments and applications, to share hard-learned experiences in order to avoid similar pitfalls, and to shed light on the future development of instance selection. This volume serves as a comprehensive reference for graduate students, practitioners and researchers in KDD.

In this book, the protection of personal data is compared for eight EU member states,namely France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Romania, Italy, Sweden andthe Netherlands. The comparison of the countries is focused on government policiesfor the protection of personal data, the applicable laws and regulations, implementationof those laws and regulations, and supervision and enforcement. Although the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) harmonizes the protectionof personal data across the EU as of May 2018, its open norms in combination withcultural differences between countries result in differences in the practical implementation,interpretation and enforcement of personal data protection. With its focus on data protection law in practice, this book provides indepth insightsinto how different countries deal with data protection issues. The knowledge and bestpractices from these countries provide highly relevant material for legal professionals,data protection officers, policymakers, data protection authorities and academicsacross Europe. Bart Custers is Associate Professor and Director of Research at the Center for Law andDigital Technologies of the Leiden Law School at Leiden University, the Netherlands.Alan M. Sears, Francien Dechesne, Ilina Georgieva and Tommaso Tani are all affiliated tothat same organization, of which Professor Simone van der Hof is the General Director.

This book reflects the latest research trends, methods and experimental results in the field of electrical and information technologies for rail transportation, which covers abundant state-of-the-art research theories and ideas. As a vital field of research that is highly relevant to current developments in a number of technological domains, the subjects it covered include intelligent computing, information processing, Communication Technology, Automatic Control, etc. The objective of the proceedings is to provide a major interdisciplinary forum for researchers, engineers, academicians as well as industrial professionals to present the most innovative research and development in the field of rail transportation electrical and information technologies. Engineers and researchers in academia, industry, and the government will also explore an insight view of the solutions that combine ideas from multiple disciplines in this field. The volumes serve as an excellent reference work for researchers and graduate students working on rail transportation, electrical and information technologies.

The second generation of cloud computing systems, known as domain-specific clouds, are emerging based on application-specific processors and serverless computing paradigm. As multimedia streaming services are increasingly growing in popularity and diversity, this book is authored to introduce "multimedia clouds" as a domain-specific cloud that operates in the intersection of cloud computing technologies and digital media streaming. The book concentrates on the architectural aspects of multimedia clouds and describes development of high-level abstractions that will mitigate the burden of programmers, cloud architects, and system administrators. Multimedia clouds not only democratize multimedia streaming and add flexibility to the streaming services, they also help stream providers to offer robust and reliable streaming services in a cost- and energy-efficient manner.

Control Systems Design of Bio-Robotics and Bio-Mechatronics with Advanced Applications delivers essential and advanced bioengineering information on the application of control and robotics technologies in the life sciences. Judging by what we have witnessed so far, this exciting field of control systems and robotics in bioengineering is likely to produce revolutionary breakthroughs over the next decade. While this book is intended for senior undergraduate or graduate students in both control engineering and biomedical engineering programs, it will also appeal to medical researchers and practitioners who want to enhance their quantitative understanding of physiological processes.

This book includes papers on intelligent expert systems and sustainability applications in the areas of data science, image processing, wireless communication, risk assessment, healthcare, intelligent social network mining, and energy. The recent growth of sustainability leads to a progressively new era of computing, where its design and deployment leverages significant impact on the intelligent systems research. Moreover, the sustainability technologies can be effectively used in the progressive deployment of various network-enabled technologies like intelligent sensors, smart cities, wearable technologies, robotics, web applications and other such Internet technologies. The thrust of this book is to publish the state-of-the-art research articles that deals with the design, development, implementation and testing of the intelligent expert systems and also to provide an overview of the sustainable management of these systems.

Rising concerns about the security of our data have made quantum cryptography a very active research field in recent years. Quantum cryptographic protocols promise everlasting security by exploiting distinctive quantum properties of nature. The most extensively implemented protocol is quantum key distribution (QKD), which enables secure communication between two users. The aim of this book is to introduce the reader to state-of-the-art QKD and illustrate its recent multi-user generalization: quantum conference key agreement. With its pedagogical approach that doesn't disdain going into details, the book enables the reader to join in cutting-edge research on quantum cryptography.

This book reports on the latest advances in the design and development of mobile computing systems and describes their applications in the context of modeling, analysis and efficient resource management. It explores challenges in mobile computing and resource management paradigms, including research efforts and approaches recently carried out in response to them and addresses future open-ended issues. The book, which includes 26 rigorously refereed chapters written by leading international researchers, provides the readers with technical and scientific information about various aspects of mobile computing, from basic concepts to advanced findings and reports on the state-of-the-art in resource management in such environments. Mainly intended as reference guide for researchers and practitioners involved in the design, development and applications of mobile computing systems and seeking solutions to related issues, it also represents a useful textbook for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses, addressing special topic such as: mobile and ad-hoc wireless networks; peer-to-peer systems for mobile computing; novel resource management techniques in cognitive radio networks; and power management in mobile computing systems.

This book discusses the design and implementation of, as well as experimentation on, an open cross-layer framework and associated methodology to provide voluntary interoperability among heterogeneous Internet of Things (IoT) platforms. It allows readers to effectively and efficiently develop smart IoT applications for various heterogeneous IoT platforms, spanning single and/or multiple application domains. To do so, it provides an interoperable framework architecture for the seamless integration of different IoT architectures present in different application domains. In this regard, interoperability is pursued at various levels: device, network, middleware, services and data.

Precision Motion Systems: Modeling, Control, and Applications presents basic dynamics and the control knowledge needed for the daily challenges of researchers and professionals working in the field. The book explains accurate dynamics and control algorithms, along with experimental validation of precision systems in industrial, medical, airborne and spaceborne applications. By using the proposed experimental designs, readers will be able to make further developments and validations.

This book features a collection of high-quality research papers presented at the International Conference on Tourism, Technology & Systems (ICOTTS 2021), held at the University of Cartagena, in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, from 4 to 6 November 2021. The book is divided into two volumes, and it covers the areas of technology in tourism and the tourist experience, generations and technology in tourism, digital marketing applied to tourism and travel, mobile technologies applied to sustainable tourism, information technologies in tourism, digital transformation of tourism business, e-tourism and tourism 2.0, big data and management for travel and tourism, geotagging and tourist mobility, smart destinations, robotics in tourism, and information systems and technologies.

This book discusses the opportunities and conditions that digital technology provides to extend, innovate and differentiate the services offered by consulting companies. It introduces suitable artefacts like web-based consulting platforms, consulting applications, semantic technologies and tools for data mining and collaboration. Furthermore it examines concepts to evaluate the virtualization of consulting processes and showcases how solutions can be developed to blend traditional and digital consulting models. Presenting state-of-the-art research and providing a comprehensive overview of the methods and techniques needed for digital transformation in the consulting industry, the book serves as both a guide and a roadmap for innovative consulting companies.

This book explores the concepts and techniques of IoT, AI, and blockchain. Also discussed is the possibility of applying blockchain for providing security in various domains. The specific highlight of this book is focused on the application of integrated technologies in enhancing data models, better insights and discovery, intelligent predictions, smarter finance, smart retail, global verification, transparent governance, and innovative audit systems. The book allows both practitioners and researchers to share their opinions and recent research in the convergence of these technologies among academicians and industry people. The contributors present their technical evaluation and compare it with existing technologies. Theoretical explanation and experimental case studies related to real-time scenarios are also included. This book pertains to IT professionals, researchers and academicians working on fourth revolution technologies.

This book provides detailed descriptions of big data solutions for activity detection and forecasting of very large numbers of moving entities spread across large geographical areas. It presents state-of-the-art methods for processing, managing, detecting and predicting trajectories and important events related to moving entities, together with advanced visual analytics methods, over multiple heterogeneous, voluminous, fluctuating and noisy data streams from moving entities, correlating them with data from archived data sources expressing e.g. entities' characteristics, geographical information, mobility patterns, mobility regulations and intentional data. The book is divided into six parts: Part I discusses the motivation and background of mobility forecasting supported by trajectory-oriented analytics, and includes specific problems and challenges in the aviation (air-traffic management) and the maritime domains. Part II focuses on big data quality assessment and processing, and presents novel technologies suitable for mobility analytics components. Next, Part III describes solutions toward processing and managing big spatio-temporal data, particularly enriching data streams and integrating streamed and archival data to provide coherent views of mobility, and storing of integrated mobility data in large distributed knowledge graphs for efficient query-answering. Part IV focuses on mobility analytics methods exploiting (online) processed, synopsized and enriched data streams as well as (offline) integrated, archived mobility data, and highlights future location and trajectory prediction methods, distinguishing between short-term and more challenging long-term predictions. Part V examines how methods addressing data management, data processing and mobility analytics are integrated in big data architectures with distinctive characteristics compared to other known big data paradigmatic architectures. Lastly, Part VI covers important ethical issues that research on mobility analytics should address. Providing novel approaches and methodologies related to mobility detection and forecasting needs based on big data exploration, processing, storage, and analysis, this book will appeal to computer scientists and stakeholders in various application domains.

This book features a collection of high-quality research papers presented at the International Conference on Tourism, Technology & Systems (ICOTTS 2020), held at the University of Cartagena, in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, from 29th to 31st October 2020. The book is divided into two volumes, and it covers the areas of technology in tourism and the tourist experience, generations and technology in tourism, digital marketing applied to tourism and travel, mobile technologies applied to sustainable tourism, information technologies in tourism, digital transformation of tourism business, e-tourism and tourism 2.0, big data and management for travel and tourism, geotagging and tourist mobility, smart destinations, robotics in tourism, and information systems and technologies.

Architectural coordination of enterprise transformation (ACET) integrates and aggregates local information and provides different viewpoints, such as financial, structural, or skill perspectives to the respective stakeholder groups, with the aim of creating a consensus and shared understanding of an enterprise transformation among the stakeholders. Its core purpose is to inform decision-makers with both local and enterprise-wide concerns so that the overall transformation goals can be successfully pursued, i.e. reducing inconsistencies and including local decisions in the overarching goals. This book consists of three major parts, framed by an introduction and a summary. To enable readers to gain a better understanding of the issues involved in real-world enterprise transformations as well as the possible role of architectural coordination and the associated challenges, Part I provides an analysis of status quo of corporate ACET practice. Part II then continues with an exploration of the challenges facing ACET from a theoretical perspective. Based on these challenges, Part III then presents a collection of components for a possible design theory for ACET. Instead of an integrated method, this collection of components constitutes method fragments that can be arranged in different ways depending on the perspective taken, the actual enterprise architecture management approach, the enterprise transformation type and the transformation's context.

This handbook aims to serve as a one-stop, reliable source of reference, with curations of survey and expository contributions on the state-of-the-art in Blockchain technology. It covers a comprehensive range of topics, providing the technical and non-technical reader with fundamentals, applications, and deep details on a variety of topics. The readership is expected to span broadly from technologically-minded business professionals and entrepreneurs, to students, instructors, novices and seasoned researchers, in computer science, engineering, software engineering, finance, and data science. Though Blockchain technology is relatively young, its evolution as a field and a practice is booming in growth and its importance to society had never been more important than it is today. Blockchain solutions enable a decentralization of a digital society where people can contribute, collaborate, and transact without having to second-guess the trust and transparency factors with many geographical, financial, and political barriers removed. It is the distributed ledger technology behind the success of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and many emerging applications. The resource is divided into 5 parts. Part 1 (Foundation) walks the reader through a comprehensive set of essential concepts, protocols, and algorithms that lay the foundation for Blockchain. Part 2 (Scalability) focuses on the most pressing challenges of today's blockchain networks in how to keep pace with real-world expectations. Part 3 (Trust and Security) provides detailed coverage on the issues of trust, reputation, and security in Blockchain. Part 4 (Decentralized Finance) is devoted to a high-impact application of Blockchain to finance, the sector that has most benefitted from this technology. Part 5 (Application and Policy) includes several cases where Blockchain applies to the real world.

This book includes research articles and expository papers on the applications of artificial intelligence and big data analytics to battle the pandemic. In the context of COVID-19, this book focuses on how big data analytic and artificial intelligence help fight COVID-19. The book is divided into four parts. The first part discusses the forecasting and visualization of the COVID-19 data. The second part describes applications of artificial intelligence in the COVID-19 diagnosis of chest X-Ray imaging. The third part discusses the insights of artificial intelligence to stop spread of COVID-19, while the last part presents deep learning and big data analytics which help fight the COVID-19.

The book shows how researchers, practitioners, and designers can improve user experiences with technology by understanding various user learning styles and characteristics when they interact with new and challenging applications and interfaces. Quality of experience in this new technological environment is affected by the learning curve involved in being able to use the new interfaces in a satisfactory way. The author explores the variations in quality of experience when considering learning and ethics when interacting with new, emerging technologies. The author shows how results can be applied to technologies such as big data, AI, 5G, and Internet of Things (IoT). Taken into account are also safety and security requirements, context, environment, etc. The book explores the idea of learning, ethics, and the idea that there exists a "recipe" for a satisfactory interaction with technology if such relevant parameters are taken into consideration. Analyzes user habits to improve quality of experience when interacting with technology; Shows how to apply quality of service techniques to 5G, IoT, big data and AI; Uses behavior models to analyze interactions to improve the user quality of experience.