This book covers in a great depth the fast growing topic of tools, techniques and applications of soft computing (e.g., fuzzy logic, genetic algorithms, neural networks, rough sets, Bayesian networks, and other probabilistic techniques) in the ontologies and the Semantic Web. The author shows how components of the Semantic Web (like the RDF, Description Logics, ontologies) can be covered with a soft computing methodology.

Electronic and internet voting has become increasingly widespread in recent years, but which countries are the leaders of the movement and who lags behind? Is the digital divide likely to present a permanent challenge to electronic democracy? What are the experiences with regard to online voting, and what are the arguments for and against? Electronic Voting and Democracy examines these issues and the contexts in which they are played out, such as problems of legitimacy and the practical considerations that have driven some countries toward electronic voting faster than others. JOACHIM ASTROM Department of Social Sciences, University of Orebro, Sweden HUBERTUS BUCHSTEIN Professor of Political Science, University of Greifswald, Germany WOLFGANG DRECHSLER Department of Public Administration, University of Tartu, Estonia HANS GESER Department of Political Science, University of Zurich, Switzerland CAROLYN HRIBAR Department of Political Science, Kent State Uniersity, Ohio, USA KIMMO GRONLUND Department of Political Science, Abo Akademi University, Turku, Finland PIA KARGER Federal Ministry of the Interior, Berlin, Germany ROBERT KOFLER Institute for Information Economics, Vienna Univers

The Semantic Web, which is intended to establish a machine-understandable Web, is currently changing from being an emerging trend to a technology used in complex real-world applications. A number of standards and techniques have been developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), e.g., the Resource Description Framework (RDF), which provides a general method for conceptual descriptions for Web resources, and SPARQL, an RDF querying language. Recent examples of large RDF data with billions of facts include the UniProt comprehensive catalog of protein sequence, function and annotation data, the RDF data extracted from Wikipedia, and Princeton University's WordNet. Clearly, querying performance has become a key issue for Semantic Web applications. In his book, Groppe details various aspects of high-performance Semantic Web data management and query processing. His presentation fills the gap between Semantic Web and database books, which either fail to take into account the performance issues of large-scale data management or fail to exploit the special properties of Semantic Web data models and queries. After a general introduction to the relevant Semantic Web standards, he presents specialized indexing and sorting algorithms, adapted approaches for logical and physical query optimization, optimization possibilities when using the parallel database technologies of today's multicore processors, and visual and embedded query languages. Groppe primarily targets researchers, students, and developers of large-scale Semantic Web applications. On the complementary book webpage readers will find additional material, such as an online demonstration of a query engine, and exercises, and their solutions, that challenge their comprehension of the topics presented.

Collecting and Conserving Net Art explores the qualities and characteristics of net art and its influence on conservation practices. By addressing and answering some of the challenges facing net art and providing an exploration of its intersection with conservation, the book casts a new light on net art, conservation, curating and museum studies. Viewing net art as a process rather than as a fixed object, the book considers how this is influenced by and executed through other systems and users. Arguing that these processes and networks are imbued with ambiguity, the book suggests that this is strategically used to create suspense, obfuscate existing systems and disrupt power structures. The rapid obsolescence of hard and software, the existence of many net artworks within restricted platforms and the fact that artworks often act as assemblages that change or mutate, make net art a challenging case for conservation. Taking the performative and interpretive roles conservators play into account, the book demonstrates how practitioners can make more informed decisions when responding to, critically analysing or working with net art, particularly software-based processes. Collecting and Conserving Net Art is intended for researchers, academics and postgraduate students, especially those engaged in the study of museum studies, conservation and heritage studies, curatorial studies, digital art and art history. The book should also be interesting to professionals who are involved in the conservation and curation of digital arts, performance, media and software.

This book presents the combined proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Multimedia and Ubiquitous Engineering (MUE 2018) and the 13th International Conference on Future Information Technology (Future Tech 2018), both held in Salerno, Italy, April 23 - 25, 2018. The aim of these two meetings was to promote discussion and interaction among academics, researchers and professionals in the field of ubiquitous computing technologies. These proceedings reflect the state of the art in the development of computational methods, involving theory, algorithms, numerical simulation, error and uncertainty analysis and novel applications of new processing techniques in engineering, science, and other disciplines related to ubiquitous computing.

This informative text/reference presents a detailed review of the state of the art in industrial sensor and control networks. The book examines a broad range of applications, along with their design objectives and technical challenges. The coverage includes fieldbus technologies, wireless communication technologies, network architectures, and resource management and optimization for industrial networks. Discussions are also provided on industrial communication standards for both wired and wireless technologies, as well as for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). Topics and features: describes the FlexRay, CAN, and Modbus fieldbus protocols for industrial control networks, as well as the MIL-STD-1553 standard; proposes a dual fieldbus approach, incorporating both CAN and ModBus fieldbus technologies, for a ship engine distributed control system; reviews a range of industrial wireless sensor network (IWSN) applications, from environmental sensing and condition monitoring, to process automation; examines the wireless networking performance, design requirements, and technical limitations of IWSN applications; presents a survey of IWSN commercial solutions and service providers, and summarizes the emerging trends in this area; discusses the latest technologies and open challenges in realizing the vision of the IIoT, highlighting various applications of the IIoT in industrial domains; introduces a logistics paradigm for adopting IIoT technology on the Physical Internet. This unique work will be of great value to all researchers involved in industrial sensor and control networks, wireless networking, and the Internet of Things.

The present economic and social environment has given rise to new situations within which companies must operate. As a first example, the globalization of the economy and the need for performance has led companies to outsource and then to operate inside networks of enterprises such as supply chains or virtual enterprises. A second instance is related to environmental issues. The statement about the impact of ind- trial activities on the environment has led companies to revise processes, to save - ergy, to optimize transportation.... A last example relates to knowledge. Knowledge is considered today to be one of the main assets of a company. How to capitalize, to manage, to reuse it for the benefit of the company is an important current issue. The three examples above have no direct links. However, each of them constitutes a challenge that companies have to face today. This book brings together the opinions of several leading researchers from all around the world. Together they try to develop new approaches and find answers to those challenges. Through the individual ch- ters of this book, the authors present their understanding of the different challenges, the concepts on which they are working, the approaches they are developing and the tools they propose. The book is composed of six parts; each one focuses on a specific theme and is subdivided into subtopics.

Mobile Intention Recognition addresses problems of practical relevance for mobile system engineers: how can we make mobile assistance systems more intelligent? How can we model and recognize patterns of human behavior which span more than a limited spatial context? This text provides an overview on plan and intention recognition, ranging from the late 1970s to very recent approaches. This overview is unique as it discusses approaches with respect to the specificities of mobile intention recognition. This book covers problems from research on mobile assistance systems using methods from artificial intelligence and natural language processing. It thus addresses an extraordinary interdisciplinary audience.

Enterprise IT infrastructure is getting increasingly complex. With the increase in complexity has arisen the need to manage it. Management in general can be seen as the process of assuring that a managed entity meets its expectations in a controlled and predictable manner. Examples of managed entities are not only components, entire systems, processes, but also people such as employees, developers, or operators, and entire organizations. Traditional management has addressed some of these issues in varied manner. The emergence of Web services has added a new complexity to the management problem and poses a new set of problems. But it also adds to the mix a set of technologies that will make the task of management simpler. Management of Web services will be critical as businesses come to rely on them as a substantial source of their revenue. The book tries to cover the broad area of web services, the concepts, implications for the enterprise, issues involved in their management and how they are being used for management themselves. The book is intended as a reference for current practice and future directions for web services and their management. The book is directed at: * Computing professionals, academicians and students to learn about the important concepts behind the web services paradigm and how it impacts the enterprise in general and how it affects traditional application, network and system management.

This book provides graduate students and practitioners with knowledge of the CORBA standard and practical experience of implementing distributed systems with CORBA's Java mapping. With tested code examples that will run immediately!

The advances in sensor design have decreased the size, weight, and cost of sensors by orders of magnitude, yet with the increase of higher spatial and temporal re- lution and accuracy. With the fast progress of sensors design and communications technique, sensor networks have also been quickly evolving in both research and practical domains in the last decade. More and more sensor networks have been - ployed in real-world to gather information for our daily life. Applications of sensor networks can be found in battle?eld surveillance, environmental monitoring, b- logical detection, smart spaces, industrial diagnostics, etc. Although the technique of sensor networks has a very promising future, many challenges are still deserving lots of research efforts for its successful applications. Thisbookisdevotedtocoveragecontrol,oneofthemostfundamentalandimportant research issues in sensor networks. The aim of the book is to provide tutorial-like and up-to-date reference resources on various coverage control problems in sensor networks, a hot topic that has been intensively researched in recent years. Due to some unique characteristics of sensor networks such as energy constraint and - hoc topology, the coverage problems in sensor networks have many new scenarios and features that entitle them an important research issue in recent years. I have done my best to include in the book the most recent advances, techniques, protocols, results, and ?ndings in this ?eld.

Design is an art form in which the designer selects from a myriad of alternatives to bring an "optimum" choice to a user. In many complex of "optimum" is difficult to define. Indeed, the users systems the notion themselves will not agree, so the "best" system is simply the one in which the designer and the user have a congruent viewpoint. Compounding the design problem are tradeoffs that span a variety of technologies and user requirements. The electronic business system is a classically complex system whose tradeoff criteria and user views are constantly changing with rapidly developing underlying technology. Professor Milutinovic has chosen this area for his capstone contribution to the computer systems design. This book completes his trilogy on design issue in computer systems. His first work, "Surviving the Design of a 200 MHz RISC Microprocessor" (1997) focused on the tradeoffs and design issues within a processor. His second work, "Surviving the Design of Microprocessor and Multiprocessor Systems" (2000) considers the design issues involved with assembling a number of processors into a coherent system. Finally, this book generalizes the system design problem to electronic commerce on the Internet, a global system of immense consequence.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th IFIP TC 12 International Conference on Intelligent Information Processing, IIP 2018, held in Nanning, China, in October 2018. The 37 full papers and 8 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 80 submissions. They are organized in topical sections on machine learning, deep learning, multi-agent systems, neural computing and swarm intelligence, natural language processing, recommendation systems, social computing, business intelligence and security, pattern recognition, and image understanding.

The World Wide Web has become a ubiquitous global tool, used for finding infor mation, communicating ideas, carrying out distributed computation and conducting business, learning and science. The Web is highly dynamic in both the content and quantity of the information that it encompasses. In order to fully exploit its enormous potential as a global repository of information, we need to understand how its size, topology and content are evolv ing. This then allows the development of new techniques for locating and retrieving information that are better able to adapt and scale to its change and growth. The Web's users are highly diverse and can access the Web from a variety of devices and interfaces, at different places and times, and for varying purposes. We thus also need techniques for personalising the presentation and content of Web based information depending on how it is being accessed and on the specific user's requirements. As well as being accessed by human users, the Web is also accessed by appli cations. New applications in areas such as e-business, sensor networks, and mobile and ubiquitous computing need to be able to detect and react quickly to events and changes in Web-based information. Traditional approaches using query-based 'pull' of information to find out if events or changes of interest have occurred may not be able to scale to the quantity and frequency of events and changes being generated, and new 'push' -based techniques are needed."

A Web portal is a special Website designed to act as a gateway giving convenient access to other related sites. This book investigates the various types of portals and describes how they can be used in business applications. After considering the nature of portals, the book describes the first general portals like Yahoo, and how they came into being. Portals are used in businesses of all types and sizes and this book discusses how portals can be used in large business corporations as well as small to medium enterprises. Web portals have increasing importance to marketers as, by their nature, they retain their users who must return to them frequently. They also provide a useful means of making information and knowledge readily available in a convenient form to authorized users. This book covers a wide range of issues relating to the use of portals in business.

Under Quality of Service (QoS) routing, paths for flows are selected based upon the knowledge of resource availability at network nodes and the QoS requirements of flows. QoS routing schemes proposed differ in the way they gather information about the network state and select paths based on this information. We broadly categorize these schemes into best-path routing and proportional routing. The best-path routing schemes gather global network state information and always select the best path for an incoming flow based on this global view. On the other hand, proportional routing schemes proportion incoming flows among a set of candidate paths. We have shown that it is possible to compute near-optimal proportions using only locally collected information. Furthermore, a few good candidate paths can be selected using infrequently exchanged global information and thus with minimal communication overhead.

Localized Quality Of Service Routing For The Internet, describes these schemes in detail demonstrating that proportional routing schemes can achieve higher throughput with lower overhead than best-path routing schemes. It first addresses the issue of finding near-optimal proportions for a given set of candidate paths based on locally collected flow statistics. This book will also look into the selection of a few good candidate paths based on infrequently exchanged global information. The final phase of this book will describe extensions to proportional routing approach to provide hierarchical routing across multiple areas in a large network.

Localized Quality Of Service Routing For The Internet is designed for researchers and practitioners in industry, and is suitable for graduatelevel students in computer science as a secondary text.

These proceedings contain the papers of IFIP/SEC 2010. It was a special honour and privilege to chair the Program Committee and prepare the proceedings for this conf- ence, which is the 25th in a series of well-established international conferences on security and privacy organized annually by Technical Committee 11 (TC-11) of IFIP. Moreover, in 2010 it is part of the IFIP World Computer Congress 2010 celebrating both the Golden Jubilee of IFIP (founded in 1960) and the Silver Jubilee of the SEC conference in the exciting city of Brisbane, Australia, during September 20-23. The call for papers went out with the challenging motto of "Security & Privacy Silver Linings in the Cloud" building a bridge between the long standing issues of security and privacy and the most recent developments in information and commu- cation technology. It attracted 102 submissions. All of them were evaluated on the basis of their significance, novelty, and technical quality by at least five member of the Program Committee. The Program Committee meeting was held electronically over a period of a week. Of the papers submitted, 25 were selected for presentation at the conference; the acceptance rate was therefore as low as 24. 5% making SEC 2010 a highly competitive forum. One of those 25 submissions could unfortunately not be included in the proceedings, as none of its authors registered in time to present the paper at the conference.

This book attempts to link some of the recent advances in crowdsourcing with advances in innovation and management. It contributes to the literature in several ways. First, it provides a global definition, insights and examples of this managerial perspective resulting in a theoretical framework. Second, it explores the relationship between crowdsourcing and technological innovation, the development of social networks and new behaviors of Internet users. Third, it explores different crowdsourcing applications in various sectors such as medicine, tourism, information and communication technology (ICT), and marketing. Fourth, it observes the ways in which crowdsourcing can improve production, finance, management and overall managerial performance. Crowdsourcing, also known as "massive outsourcing" or "voluntary outsourcing," is the act of taking a job or a specific task usually performed by an employee of a company or contractors, and outsourcing it to a large group of people or a community (crowd or mass) via the Internet, through an open call. The term was coined by Jeff Howe in a 2006 issue of Wired magazine. It is being developed in different sciences (i.e., medicine, engineering, ICT, management) and is used in the most successful companies of the modern era (i.e., Apple, Facebook, Inditex, Starbucks). The developments in crowdsourcing has theoretical and practical implications, which will be explored in this book. Including contributions from international academics, scholars and professionals within the field, this book provides a global, multidimensional perspective on crowdsourcing.

This collected volume gathers a broad spectrum of social science and information science articles about Facebook. It looks into facets of users, such as age, sex, and culture, and into facets of use, e.g. privacy behavior after the Snowden affair, unfriending on Facebook, or Facebook addiction, as well as into quality perceptions. Written by leading scholars investigating the impact of Web 2.0., this volume is highly relevant for social media researchers, information scientists, and social scientists, and, not least, for everyone interested in Facebook-related topics.

With the purpose of building upon standard web technologies, open linked data serves as a useful way to connect previously unrelated data and to publish structured data on the web. The application of these elements leads to the creation of data commons called semantic web. Cases on Open-Linked Data and Semantic Web Applications brings together new theories, research findings and case studies which cover the recent developments and approaches towards applied open linked data and semantic web in the context of information systems. By enhancing the understanding of open linked data in business, science and information technologies, this reference source aims to be useful for academics, researchers, and practitioners. With the purpose of building upon standard web technologies, open linked data serves as a useful way to connect previously unrelated data and to publish structured data on the web. The application of these elements leads to the creation of data commons called semantic web.