This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the joint International Workshops on Semantic Web, Ontologies and Databases, SWDB-ODBIS 2007, co-located with the 33rd International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, VLDB 2007, held in Vienna, Austria, in September 2007.

The 7 revised full papers presented together with 1 invited paper were carefully selected from 11 submissions. Among the topics addressed are semantics-aware data models and query languages; ontology-based views, mapping, transformations, and query reformulation; and storing and indexing semantic Web data and schemas.

th The 13 edition of the International Conference on Reliable Software Technologies (Ada-Europe 2008) marked its arrival in Italy by selecting the splendid venue of Venice. It did so after having been hosted twice in Switzerland, Spain and the UK (Montreux for its inauguration in 1996 and Geneva in 2007; Santander in 1999 and Palma de Mallorca in 2004; London in 1997 and York in 2005), and having visited Sweden (Uppsala, 1998), Germany (Potsdam, 2000), Belgium (Leuven, 2001), Austria (Vienna, 2002), France (Toulouse, 2003) and Portugal (Porto, 2006). It was certainly high time that the conference came to Italy! The conference series, which is run and sponsored by Ada-Europe, chooses its yearly venue following two driving criteria: to celebrate the activity of one of its national member societies in a particular country, and/or to facilitate the formation, or the growth, of a national community around all aspects of reliable software technologies. The success of this year's conference, beside the richness of its technical and social program, will thus be measured by its lasting effects. We can only hope that the latter will be as good and vast as the former! Owing to the absence of a national society associated with Ada-Europe in Italy, the organization of the conference was technically sustained by selected members of the Board of Ada-Europe, its governing body, with some invaluable local support.

This volume contains contributions from participants in the 2007 International Multiconference of Engineers and Computer Scientists. Topics covered include Automated planning, Expert system, Machine learning, Fuzzy Systems, Knowledge-based systems, Computer systems organization, Computing methodologies, and industrial applications. The book offers the up to date information on advances in intelligent systems and computer engineering and also serve as an excellent reference work for researchers and graduate students working on intelligent systems and computer engineering.

This book contains a selection of papers presented at the International Seminar "Negotiation and Market Engineering," held at Dagstuhl Castle, Germany, in November 2006.

The 17 revised full papers presented in this volume were carefully selected and reviewed after the seminar. The papers deal with the complexity of negotiations, auctions, and markets as economic, social, and IT systems. The authors give a broad overview on the major issues to be addressed and the methodologies used to approach them, covering highly interdisciplinary research from computer science, economics, business administration, and mathematics.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Conference on Spatial Cognition, Spatial Cognition 2006, held in Bremen, Germany, September 24-28, 2006.

The 28 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 59 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on Spatial Reasoning, Human-Robot Interaction, Visuo-Spatial Reasoning and Spatial Dynamics, Spatial Concepts, Human Memory, Mental Reasoning and Assistance, Spatial Concepts, Human Memory and Mental Reasoning, Navigation, Wayfinding and Route Instructions as well as Linguistic and Social Issues in Spatial Knowledge Processing.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Ubiquitous Computing Systems, UCS 2007, held in Tokyo, Japan, in November 2007.

The 16 revised full papers and 8 revised short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 96 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on security and privacy, context awareness, sensing systems and sensor network, middleware, modeling and social aspects, smart devices, and network.

The papers in this volume are the refereed application papers presented at AI-2007, the Twenty-seventh SGAI International Conference on Innovative Techniques and Applications of Artificial Intelligence, held in Cambridge in December 2007.

The papers present new and innovative developments in the field, divided into sections on Synthesis and Prediction, Scheduling and Search, Diagnosis and Monitoring, Classification and Design, and Analysis and Evaluation.

This is the fifteenth volume in the Applications and Innovations series. The series serves as a key reference on the use of AI Technology to enable organisations to solve complex problems and gain significant business benefits.

The Technical Stream papers are published as a companion volume under the title Research and Development in Intelligent Systems XXIV.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Hybrid Metaheuristics, HM 2007, held in Dortmund, Germany, in October 2007.

The 14 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 37 submissions. The papers discuss specific aspects of hybridization of metaheuristics, hybrid metaheuristics design, development and testing. With increasing attention to methodological aspects, from both the empirical and theoretical sides, the papers show a representative sample of research in the field of hybrid metaheuristics. Some papers put special emphasis on the experimental analysis and statistical assessment of results, some are also an example of the integration of metaheuristics with mathematical programming, constraint satisfaction or machine learning techniques.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Case-Based Reasoning, ICCBR 2007, held in Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK in August 2007.

The 15 revised full research papers and 18 revised poster papers presented together with 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 64 submissions. The papers address all current aspects of case-based reasoning and feature original theoretical research, applied research, and deployed applications with practical, social, environmental or economic significance.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th European Conference on Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases, PKDD 2007, held in Warsaw, Poland, in September 2007, co-located with ECML 2007, the 18th European Conference on Machine Learning.

The 28 revised full papers and 35 revised short papers presented together with abstracts of 4 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 592 papers submitted to both, ECML and PKDD. The papers present original results on leading-edge subjects of knowledge discovery from conventional and complex data and address all current issues in the area.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Cooperative Information Agents, CIA 2007, held in Delft, The Netherlands, September 19-21, 2007.

The 19 revised full papers presented together with 4 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 38 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on Information Search and Processing, Applications, Rational Cooperation, Interaction and Cooperation and Trust.

These three volumes are a collection of the contributions presented to the joint th conferencesofKES2007,the11 InternationalConferenceonKnowledge-Based and Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems, and the WIRN 2007, the th 17 Italian Workshop on Neural Networks, held in Vietri sul Mare, Italy, in September 2007. TheformulabywhichKESconferencesgatherover500peopleeachyearfrom the four corners of the globe to discuss the topic of knowledge-based and int- ligent information and engineering systems is: an open mind with rigor. Within the vastuniverseofthe conferencescenteredaroundthekeywords"information" and "computational intelligence," we encourage in our meetings the o?ering of newideas andtechniques to givesolutions to the never-endingseriesof problems and challenges that our own intelligence poses. As a precious attribute of the human brain, we will never be disturbed by the novelty, and possibly the provocation, of new mental paradigms and h- ardous conjectures, especially if they are raised by fresh research teams. At the same time, we have riddled eachcontribution using the sieve of scienti?c quality, checking the rigor with which the ideas are illustrated, their understandability and the support of the theory or of the experimental evidence. The structure of the conference re?ects this philosophy. In addition to re- lartracksonthemain?eldsofthediscipline,weinvitedscientiststoproposes- sions focused on topics of high interest. Their response was generous and based onallsources,wereceivedsome1203submissions.Fromthisnumberwecollected 11 general track sessions and 47 invited sessions to make a total of 409 papers after a severe referee screening, an acceptance rate of 34%. Thus the reader may havefromthesevolumesanalmostexhaustiveoverviewofresearcher'sandprac- tioner'scurrentworkinthe?eldofinformationextractionandintelligentsystems.

The three volume set LNAI 4692, LNAI 4693, and LNAI 4694, constitute the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems, KES 2007, held in Vietri sul Mare, Italy, September 12-14, 2007.

The 409 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from about 1203 submissions. The papers present a wealth of original research results from the field of intelligent information processing in the broadest sense; topics covered in the first volume are artificial neural networks and connectionists systems, fuzzy and neuro-fuzzy systems, evolutionary computation, machine learning and classical AI, agent systems, knowledge based and expert systems, hybrid intelligent systems, miscellaneous intelligent algorithms, intelligent vision and image processing, knowledge management and ontologies, Web intelligence, multimedia, e-learning and teaching, intelligent signal processing, control and robotics, other intelligent systems applications, papers of the experience management and engineering workshop, industrial applications of intelligent systems, as well as information engineering and applications in ubiquotous computing environments.

Researchers and professionals in the relevant fields will find this book a must-read, as it defines the leading edge of current research into conceptual structures. It constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Conceptual Structures, held in Sheffield, UK in July 2007. With almost 50 papers contained in its 500 pages, it includes a special focus on the application of conceptual structures in business and technological settings and is organized into topical sections for ease of reference.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Automated Reasoning with Analytic Tableaux and Related Methods, TABLEAUX 2007, held in Aix en Provence, France in July 2007.

The 14 revised research papers presented together with 2 system descriptions as well as 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 43 submissions. The papers cover many topics in the wide range of logics; from intuitionistic and substructural logics to modal logics (including temporal and dynamic logics), from many-valued logics to nonmonotonic logics, from classical first-order logic to description logics. Some contributions are focused on decision procedures, others on efficient reasoning, as well as on implementation of theorem provers. A few papers explore applications such as model-checking, verification, or knowledge engineering. Finally some contributions make use of tableaux as a tool for theoretical investigation of logics.

The two-volume set LNCS 4527 and LNCS 4528 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Work-Conference on the Interplay between Natural and Artificial Computation, IWINAC 2007, held in La Manga del Mar Menor, Spain in June 2007.

The 126 revised papers presented are thematically divided into two volumes; the first includes all the contributions mainly related with theoretical, conceptual and methodological aspects linking AI and knowledge engineering with neurophysiology, clinics and cognition. The second volume contains all the contributions connected with biologically inspired methods and techniques for solving AI and knowledge engineering problems in different application domains.

The two-volume set LNCS 4527 and LNCS 4528 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Work-Conference on the Interplay between Natural and Artificial Computation, IWINAC 2007, held in La Manga del Mar Menor, Spain in June 2007.

The 126 revised papers presented are thematically divided into two volumes; the first includes all the contributions mainly related with theoretical, conceptual and methodological aspects linking AI and knowledge engineering with neurophysiology, clinics and cognition. The second volume contains all the contributions connected with biologically inspired methods and techniques for solving AI and knowledge engineering problems in different application domains.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the Second International Conference on Topic Map Research and Applications, TMRA 2006, held in Leipzig, Germany in October 2006.

The 15 revised full papers and 6 revised short papers presented together with 1 invited lecture were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvement from a total of 52 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections headed creation and visualization of topic maps, applied topic maps in industry, administration and sciences, standards related research, leveraging the semantics, technical issues of topic mapping, and social software with topic maps.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 2006 Pacific Rim Knowledge Acquisition Workshop, PKAW 2006, held in Guilin, China in August 2006 as part of 9th Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, PRICAI 2006.

The 21 revised full papers and 6 revised short papers presented together with 4 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 81 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on ontology and knowledge acquisition, algorithm approaches to knowledge acquisition, incremental knowledge acquisition and RDR, knowledge acquisition and applications, as well as machine learning and data mining.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management, EKAW 2006, held in Podebrady, Czech Republic in October 2006. The 17 revised full papers and 16 revised short papers presented together with two invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 119 submissions.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Hybrid Metaheuristics, HM 2006, held in Gran Canaria, Spain, in October 2006. The 13 revised full papers presented together with one invited paper were carefully reviewed and selected from 42 submissions.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th European Conference on Case-Based Reasoning, ECCBR 2004, held in Fethiye, Turkey in September 2006. The book presents 31 revised full papers and 5 revised application papers together with 2 invited papers and 2 abstracts of invited talks. The coverage represents snapshot of current current issues in case-based reasoning, ranging from theoretical and methodological issues to advanced applications in various fields.

An Introduction to Knowledge Engineering presents a simple but detailed exp- ration of current and established work in the ?eld of knowledge-based systems and related technologies. Its treatment of the increasing variety of such systems is designed to provide the reader with a substantial grounding in such techno- gies as expert systems, neural networks, genetic algorithms, case-based reasoning systems, data mining, intelligent agents and the associated techniques and meth- ologies. The material is reinforced by the inclusion of numerous activities that provide opportunities for the reader to engage in their own research and re?ection as they progress through the book. In addition, self-assessment questions allow the student to check their own understanding of the concepts covered. The book will be suitable for both undergraduate and postgraduate students in computing science and related disciplines such as knowledge engineering, arti?cial intelligence, intelligent systems, cognitive neuroscience, robotics and cybernetics. vii Contents Foreword vii 1 An Introduction to Knowledge Engineering. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Section 1: Data, Information and Knowledge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Section 2: Skills of a Knowledge Engineer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Section 3: An Introduction to Knowledge-Based Systems. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 2 Types of Knowledge-Based Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 Section 1: Expert Systems. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Section 2: Neural Networks. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 Section 3: Case-Based Reasoning. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 Section 4: Genetic Algorithms. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 Section 5: Intelligent Agents. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 Section 6: Data Mining . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 3 Knowledge Acquisition. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 4 Knowledge Representation and Reasoning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108 Section 1: Using Knowledge. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 Section 2: Logic, Rules and Representation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116 Section 3: Developing Rule-Based Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126 Section 4: Semantic Networks. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Cooperative Information Agents, CIA 2006, held in Edinburgh, UK in September 2006. The 29 revised full papers presented together with four invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 58 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 20th Annual Working Conference on Data and Applications Security held in Sophia Antipolis, France, in July/August 2006.

The 22 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 56 submissions. The papers present theory, technique, applications, and practical experience of data and application security covering a number of diverse research topics such as access control, privacy, and identity management.