This book constitutes the proceedings of the 11th International Symposium on Web and Wireless Geographical Information Systems, W2GIS 2012, held in Naples, Italy, in April 2012. The 13 full and 4 short papers presented in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 32 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections named: 3D and multimodal spatial interaction; positioning; spatial human-computer interaction; trajectory analysis; geo semantics; and sensor networks.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 34th European Conference on IR Research, ECIR 2012, held in Barcelona, Spain, in April 2012. The 37 full papers, 28 poster papers and 7 demonstrations presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 167 submissions. The contributions are organized in sections named: query representation; blogs and online-community search; semi-structured retrieval; evaluation; applications; retrieval models; image and video retrieval; text and content classification, categorisation, clustering; systems efficiency; industry track; and posters.

GPU Pro4: Advanced Rendering Techniques presents ready-to-use ideas and procedures that can help solve many of your day-to-day graphics programming challenges. Focusing on interactive media and games, the book covers up-to-date methods for producing real-time graphics. Section editors Wolfgang Engel, Christopher Oat, Carsten Dachsbacher, Michal Valient, Wessam Bahnassi, and Sebastien St-Laurent have once again assembled a high-quality collection of cutting-edge techniques for advanced graphics processing unit (GPU) programming. Divided into six sections, the book begins with discussions on the ability of GPUs to process and generate geometry in exciting ways. It next introduces new shading and global illumination techniques for the latest real-time rendering engines and explains how image space algorithms are becoming a key way to achieve a more realistic and higher quality final image. Moving on to the difficult task of rendering shadows, the book describes the state of the art in real-time shadow maps. It then covers game engine design, including quality, optimization, and high-level architecture. The final section explores approaches that go beyond the normal pixel and triangle scope of GPUs as well as techniques that take advantage of the parallelism of modern graphic processors in a variety of applications. Useful to beginners and seasoned game and graphics programmers alike, this color book offers practical tips and techniques for creating real-time graphics. Example programs and source code are available for download on the book's CRC Press web page. The directory structure of the online material closely follows the book structure by using the chapter numbers as the name of the subdirectory.

In Data Sketches, Nadieh Bremer and Shirley Wu document the deeply creative process behind 24 unique data visualization projects, and they combine this with powerful technical insights which reveal the mindset behind coding creatively. Exploring 12 different themes - from the Olympics to Presidents & Royals and from Movies to Myths & Legends - each pair of visualizations explores different technologies and forms, blurring the boundary between visualization as an exploratory tool and an artform in its own right. This beautiful book provides an intimate, behind-the-scenes account of all 24 projects and shares the authors' personal notes and drafts every step of the way. The book features: Detailed information on data gathering, sketching, and coding data visualizations for the web, with screenshots of works-in-progress and reproductions from the authors' notebooks Never-before-published technical write-ups, with beginner-friendly explanations of core data visualization concepts Practical lessons based on the data and design challenges overcome during each project Full-color pages, showcasing all 24 final data visualizations This book is perfect for anyone interested or working in data visualization and information design, and especially those who want to take their work to the next level and are inspired by unique and compelling data-driven storytelling.

Multimedia Information Systems brings together in one place important contributions and up-to-date research results in this fast moving area. Multimedia Information Systems serves as an excellent reference, providing insight into some of the most challenging research issues in the field.

The concept of content delivery (also known as content distribution) is be coming increasingly important due to rapidly growing demands for efficient distribution and fast access of information in the Internet. Content delivery is very broad and comprehensive in that the contents for distribution cover a wide range of types with significantly different characteristics and performance concerns, including HTML documents, images, multimedia streams, database tables, and dynamically generated contents. Moreover, to facilitate ubiqui tous information access, the network architectures and hardware devices also vary widely. They range from broadband wired/fixed networks to bandwid- constrained wireless/mobile networks, and from powerful workstations/PCs to personal digital assistants (PDAs) and cellular phones with limited processing and display capabilities. All these levels of diversity are introducing numerous challenges on content delivery technologies. It is desirable to deliver contents in their best quality based on the nature of the contents, network connections and client devices. This book aims at providing a snapshot of the state-of-the-art research and development activities on web content delivery and laying the foundations for future web applications. The book focuses on four main areas: (1) web con tent delivery; (2) dynamic web content; (3) streaming media delivery; and (4) ubiquitous web access. It consists of 17 chapters written by leading experts in the field. The book is designed for a professional audience including academic researchers and industrial practitioners who are interested in the most recent research and development activities on web content delivery."

This book brings together three great motifs of the network society: the seeking and using of information by individuals and groups; the creation and application of knowledge in organizations; and the fundamental transformation of these activities as they are enacted on the Internet and the World Wide Web. Of the three, the study of how individuals and groups seek information probably has the longest history, beginning with the early "information needs and uses" studies soon after the Second World War. The study of organizations as knowledge-based social systems is much more recent, and really gained momentum only within the last decade or so. The study of the World Wide Web as information and communication media is younger still, but has generated tremendous excitement, partly because it has the potential to reconfigure the ways in which people seek information and use knowledge, and partly because it offers new methods of analyzing and measuring how in fact such information and knowledge work gets done. As research endeavors, these streams overlap and share conceptual constructs, perspectives, and methods of analysis. Although these overlaps and shared concerns are sometimes apparent in the published research, there have been few attempts to connect these ideas explicitly and identify cross-disciplinary themes. This book is an attempt to fill this void. The three authors of this book possess contrasting backgrounds and thus adopt complementary vantage points to observe information seeking and knowledge work.

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.

The main intention of this book is to give an impression of the state-of-the-art in system-level memory management (data transfer and storage) related issues for complex data-dominated real-time signal and data processing applications. The material is based on research at IMEC in this area in the period 1989- 1997. In order to deal with the stringent timing requirements and the data dominated characteristics of this domain, we have adopted a target architecture style and a systematic methodology to make the exploration and optimization of such systems feasible. Our approach is also very heavily application driven which is illustrated by several realistic demonstrators, partly used as red-thread examples in the book. Moreover, the book addresses only the steps above the traditional high-level synthesis (scheduling and allocation) or compilation (traditional or ILP oriented) tasks. The latter are mainly focussed on scalar or scalar stream operations and data where the internal structure of the complex data types is not exploited, in contrast to the approaches discussed here. The proposed methodologies are largely independent of the level of programmability in the data-path and controller so they are valuable for the realisation of both hardware and software systems. Our target domain consists of signal and data processing systems which deal with large amounts of data."

Multimedia Technologies and Applications for the 21st Century: Visions of World Experts presents contributions from leading researchers and experts describing their current research and their views of the future trends in the field. The book consists of thirteen chapters in five parts. These chapters tackle a number of critical issues in distributed multimedia systems and applications - from VLSI processors that support multimedia and multimedia servers, through multimedia databases and multimedia networks and communications, to merging multimedia applications. Only a few years ago multimedia seemed like a brand new research field and an emerging new industry. Today, at the edge of the 21st century, multimedia research is coming of age, and the multimedia industry has significantly grown with the total market estimated to be about $50 billion. Several years ago it was felt that the digital media revolution had just started; however, the seeds had been sown long before. Fundamental technologies, such as interactive laser disks, video games, and electronic encyclopedias were invented in the 1970s and 80s. They represented the seeds for current hot' applications, such as digital libraries, video-on-demand, interactive television, and videoconferencing. Another aspect of the digital media revolution is the formation of a new media industry composed of computer, entertainment, communication, and consumer electronics companies. Many industry segments are currently involved in creating new products and services, positioning themselves for the 21st century. They include telephone, cable, and satellite TV companies, communication equipment companies, TV and radio broadcasters, on-line Internet service providers, cable channels, movie studios, record companies, book publishers, CD-ROM title creators, Internet tool vendors, multimedia software tools companies, computer companies, general software tools companies, computer add-on vendors, semiconductor vendors, and consumer electronics vendors. Multimedia Technologies and Applications for the 21st Century: Visions of World Experts should stimulate the curiosity of its readers and inspire new technological breakthroughs in this exciting field. It serves as a valuable reference for system designers, engineers, programmers, and managers who are involved in multimedia systems, the Internet, and their applications. This book can also be used as a textbook for advanced courses on multimedia in engineering curricula.

This textbook was inspired by an undergraduate elective course given on virtual organizations and technology. The instructor could not find a suitable text that covered both the organizational and technological aspects including examples based on today's industry. Other books were either too strategic or too technical for an audience of undergraduate business and technology students who were to use the book. But why was that the case? For the same reason that business and IT people in industry tended not to speak the same "language": indeed, the integration of technology into business strategy has been a recent occurrence, and traditional strategy issues have been decided too high in the organizational structure while technology was too detailed in tactical implementation. With the Internet and the advent of e-commerce, m-commerce, and c-commerce (and the other letters of the alphabet soon to follow), business and technology finally started to become closer, and the interest in technology as an enabler for strategic business decision-making evolved into a mainstream concept. How are we defining a virtual organization? Most definitions of the concept of virtual organizations start with stating that it is "a network between organisations or individuals . . . ". The Oxford Concise Dictionary defines 'virtual' as: "that is such/or practical purposes, though not in name or according to a strict definition. " An organization may be thought of as a number of individuals systematically united for some end or work.

Information intermediation is the foundation stone of some of the most successful Internet companies, and is perhaps second only to the Internet Infrastructure companies. On the heels of information integration and interoperability, this book on information brokering discusses the next step in information interoperability and integration. The emerging Internet economy based on burgeoning B2B and B2C trading will soon demand semantics-based information intermediation for its feasibility and success. B2B ventures are involved in the rationalization' of new vertical markets and construction of domain specific product catalogs. This book provides approaches for re-use of existing vocabularies and domain ontologies as a basis for this rationalization and provides a framework based on inter-ontology interoperation. Infrastructural trade-offs that identify optimizations in performance and scalability of web sites will soon give way to information based trade-offs as alternate rationalization schemes come into play and the necessity of interoperating across these schemes is realized. Information Brokering Across Heterogeneous Digital Data's intended readers are researchers, software architects and CTOs, advanced product developers dealing with information intermediation issues in the context of e-commerce (B2B and B2C), information technology professionals in various vertical markets (e.g., geo-spatial information, medicine, auto), and all librarians interested in information brokering.

Multimedia Encryption and Watermarking presents a comprehensive survey of contemporary multimedia encryption and watermarking techniques, which enable a secure exchange of multimedia intellectual property. Part I, Digital Rights Management (DRM) for Multimedia, introduces DRM concepts and models for multimedia content protection, and presents the key players. Part II, Multimedia Cryptography, provides an overview of modern cryptography, with the focus on modern image, video, speech, and audio encryption techniques. This book also provides an advanced concept of visual and audio sharing techniques. Part III, Digital Watermarking, introduces the concept of watermarking for multimedia, classifies watermarking applications, and evaluates various multimedia watermarking concepts and techniques, including digital watermarking techniques for binary images. Multimedia Encryption and Watermarking is designed for researchers and practitioners, as well as scientists and engineers who design and develop systems for the protection of digital multimedia content. This volume is also suitable as a textbook for graduate courses on multimedia security.

Several works on multimedia storage appear in literature today, but very little if any, have been devoted to handling long duration video retrieval, over large scale networks. Distributed retrieval of multimedia documents, especially the long duration documents, is an imperative step in rendering high-quality, high-fidelity, and cost-effective services for network service providers.

Distributed Multimedia Retrieval Strategies for Large Scale Networked Systems presents an up-to-date research status in the domain of distributed video retrieval. This professional book will include several different techniques that are in place for long duration video retrieval. An experimentally tested technology under the JINI platform, demonstrates a practical working system which serves as a feasibility study, as well as the first step in realizing such a technology.

3D Face Processing: Modeling, Analysis and Synthesis introduces the frontiers of 3D face processing techniques. It reviews existing 3D face processing techniques, including techniques for 3D face geometry modeling; 3D face motion modeling; and 3D face motion tracking and animation. Then it discusses a unified framework for face modeling, analysis and synthesis. In this framework, the authors present new methods for modeling complex natural facial motion, as well as face appearance variations due to illumination and subtle motion. Then the authors apply the framework to face tracking, expression recognition and face avatar for HCI interface. They conclude this book with comments on future work in the 3D face processing framework.
3D Face Processing: Modeling, Analysis and Synthesis will interest those working in face processing for intelligent human computer interaction and video surveillance. It contains a comprehensive survey on existing face processing techniques, which can serve as a reference for students and researchers. It also covers in-depth discussion on face motion analysis and synthesis algorithms, which will benefit more advanced graduate students and researchers.

This book covers the MPEG H.264 and MS VC-1 video coding standards as well as issues in broadband video delivery over IP networks. This professional reference is designed for industry practitioners, including video engineers, and professionals in consumer electronics, telecommunications and media compression industries. The book is also suitable as a secondary text for advanced-level students in computer science and electrical engineering.

Although computer graphics games and animations have been popular for more than a decade, recently personal computers evolved to support real-time, realistic-looking interactive games. OpenGL, a technology standard to develop CG applications, has had incredible momentum in both the professional and consumer markets. Once only the domain of production houses, OpenGL has grown to be the standard for graphics programming on all platforms, personal computers, and workstations. Now more than ever, people are eager to learn about what it takes to make such productions, and how they can be a part of them. Current literature on how to make movies/games focus more on the technology (OpenGL, DirectX, etc) and their APIs rather than on the principles of computer graphics. However, understanding these principles is the key to dealing with any technology API. The aim of "Principles of Computer Graphics and OpenGL" is to teach readers the principles of computer graphics. Hands-on examples developed in OpenGL illustrate the key concepts, and readers develop a professional animation, following traditional processes used in production houses. By the end of the book, readers will be experts in the principles of computer graphics and OpenGL. They will be able to develop their own professional quality games via the same approach used in production houses.

The systems used to process data streams and provide for the needs of stream-based applications are Data Stream Management Systems (DSMSs).

This book presents a new paradigm to meet the needs of these applications, including a detailed discussion of the techniques proposed. Ii includes important aspects of a QoS-driven DSMS (Data Stream Management System) and introduces applications where a DSMS can be used and discusses needs beyond the stream processing model. It also discusses in detail the design and implementation of MavStream. This volume is primarily intended as a reference book for researchers and advanced-level students in computer science. It is also appropriate for practitioners in industry who are interested in developing applications.

Multimedia computing has emerged in the last few years as a major area of research. Multimedia computer systems have opened a wide range of applications by combining a variety of information sources, such as voice, graphics, animation, images, audio, and full-motion video. Looking at the big picture, multimedia can be viewed as the merging of three industries: the computer, communications, and broadcasting industries. Research and development efforts in multimedia computing can be divided into two areas. As the first area of research, much effort has been centered on the stand-alone multimedia workstation and associated software systems and tools, such as music composition, computer-aided education and training, and interactive video. However, the combination of multimedia computing with distributed systems offers even greater potential. New applications based on distributed multimedia systems include multimedia information systems, collaborative and videoconferencing systems, on-demand multimedia services, and distance learning. Multimedia Tools and Applications is one of two volumes published by Kluwer, both of which provide a broad introduction to this fast moving area. This book covers selected tools applied in multimedia systems and key multimedia applications. Topics presented include multimedia application development techniques, techniques for content-based manipulation of image databases, techniques for selection and dissemination of digital video, and tools for digital video segmentation. Selected key applications described in the book include multimedia news services, multimedia courseware and training, interactive television systems, digital video libraries, multimedia messaging systems, and interactive multimedia publishing systems. The second book, Multimedia Systems and Techniques, covers fundamental concepts and techniques used in multimedia systems. The topics include multimedia objects and related models, multimedia compression techniques and standards, multimedia interfaces, multimedia storage techniques, multimedia communication and networking, multimedia synchronization techniques, multimedia information systems, scheduling in multimedia systems, and video indexing and retrieval techniques. Multimedia Tools and Applications, along with its companion volume, is intended for anyone involved in multimedia system design and applications and can be used as a textbook for advanced courses on multimedia.

The book serves as a collection of multi-disciplinary contributions related to Geographic Hypermedia and highlights the technological aspects of GIS. Specifically, it focuses on its database and database management system. The methodologies for modeling and handling geographic data are described.

It presents the novel models, methods and tools applied in Spatial Decision Support paradigm.

This book covers various aspects of spatial data modelling specifically regarding three-dimensional (3D) modelling and structuring. The realization of "true" 3D geoinformation spatial systems requires a high input, and the developmental process is taking place in various research centers and universities around the globe. The development of such systems and solutions, including the modelling theories are presented in this book.

Lessons learned in the last several years have given clear indications that the prediction and efficient monitoring of disasters is one of the critical factors in decision-making process. In this respect space-based technologies have the great potential of supplying information in near real time. Earth observation satellites have already demonstrated their flexibility in providing data to a wide range of applications: weather forecasting, person and vehicle tracking, alerting to disaster, forest fire and flood monitoring, oil spills, spread of desertification, monitoring of crop and forestry damages.

This book focuses on a wider utilisation of remote sensing in disaster management. The discussed aspects comprise data access/delivery to the users, information extraction and analysis, management of data and its integration with other data sources (airborne and terrestrial imagery, GIS data, etc.), data standardization, organisational and legal aspects of sharing remote sensing information.

-Presents state-of-the-art in visual media retrieval.

-Coverage of adaptive content-based retrieval systems and techniques in image and video database applications.

-Includes a novel machine-controlled interactive retrieval (MCIR) method that optimizes image search in distributed digital libraries over the Internet.

This book is a groundbreaking resource that covers both algorithms and technologies of interactive videos. It presents recent research and application work for building and browsing interactive digital videos. The book deals mainly with low-level semi-automatic and full-automatic processing of the video content for intelligent human computer interaction. There is a special focus on eye tracking methods.

This volume introduces machine learning techniques that are particularly powerful and effective for modeling multimedia data and common tasks of multimedia content analysis. It systematically covers key machine learning techniques in an intuitive fashion and demonstrates their applications through case studies. Coverage includes examples of unsupervised learning, generative models and discriminative models. In addition, the book examines Maximum Margin Markov (M3) networks, which strive to combine the advantages of both the graphical models and Support Vector Machines (SVM).