This is an edited volume based on the 2007 Conference on Metadata and Semantics Research (MTSR), now in its second meeting. Metadata research is a pluri-disciplinary field that encompasses all aspects of the definition, creation, assessment, management and use of metadata. The volume brings together world class leaders to contribute their research and up-to-date information on metadata and semantics applied to library management, e-commerce, e-business, information science and librarianship, to name a few. The book is designed for a professional audience composed of researchers and practitioners in industry.

Professionals who use multimedia documents as a tool to communicate concepts will find this a hugely illuminating text. It provides a comprehensive and up to date account of relevant research issues, methodologies and results in the area of multimedia comprehension. More specifically, the book draws connections between cognitive research, instructional strategies and design methodologies. It includes theoretical reviews, discussions of research techniques, ad original experimental contributions. The book highlights essential aspects of current theories, and trends for future research on the use of multimedia documents.

For the first time, a comprehensive collection of the latest developments in scripting and representation languages for life-like characters. The text introduces toolkits for authoring animated characters which further supports the practicality and ease of use of this new interface technology. As life-like characters is a vibrant research area, various applications have been designed and implemented. The text covers the most successful and promising applications, ranging from product presentation and student training to knowledge integration and interactive gaming. It also discusses the key challenges in the area and provides design guidelines for employing life-like characters.

MARTENS Bob and BROWN Andre Co-conference Chairs, CAAD Futures 2005 Computer Aided Architectural Design is a particularly dynamic field that is developing through the actions of architects, software developers, researchers, technologists, users, and society alike. CAAD tools in the architectural office are no longer prominent outsiders, but have become ubiquitous tools for all professionals in the design disciplines. At the same time, techniques and tools from other fields and uses, are entering the field of architectural design. This is exemplified by the tendency to speak of Information and Communication Technology as a field in which CAAD is embedded. Exciting new combinations are possible for those, who are firmly grounded in an understanding of architectural design and who have a clear vision of the potential use of ICT. CAAD Futures 2005 called for innovative and original papers in the field of Computer Aided Architectural Design, that present rigorous, high-quality research and development work. Papers should point towards the future, but be based on a thorough understanding of the past and present.

This volume presents state-of-the-art research from a wide area of subjects brought about by the digital convergence of computing, television, telecommunications and the World-Wide Web. It represents a unique snapshot of trends across a wide range of subjects including virtual environments; virtual reality; telepresence; human-computer interface design; interactivity; avatars; and the Internet. Both researchers and practitioners will find it an invaluable source of reference.

Thisbook presentsrecentadvancesinthedomainofthe3Dphysiologicalhuman that werepresentedlastDecember at the Workshopon 3D PhysiologicalHuman 2009 that was held in Zermatt, Switzerland. This workshop was funded by the "Third Cycle in Computer Science of Western Switzerland" named CUSO, the European project Focus K3D (ICT-2007-214993), the European Marie Curie project 3D Anatomical Human (MRTN-CT-2006-035763) and the European Network of Excellence InterMedia (NoE-IST-2006-038419). 3D physiological human research is a very active ?eld supported by several scienti?c projects. Many of them are funded by the European Union, such as the 3D Anatomical Human project and those present in the seventh framework programme "Virtual Physiological Human"(FP7-ICT-2007-2). One of the main objectivesof the researchon 3D physiologicalhuman is to create patient-speci?c computer models for personalized healthcare.These models are used to simulate and hence better understand the human physiology and pathology.There is also a synergy in this research in the way medical information is distributed: to have any model available anytime, anywhere on any mobile equipment. A collection of scienti?c articles was proposed to highlight the necessity to exchange and disseminate novel ideas and techniques from a wide range of d- ciplines (computer graphics, biomechanics, knowledge representation, human- machine interface, mobile computing, etc. ) associated with medical imaging, medical simulation, computer-assisted surgery and 3D semantics. The emphasis wason technicalnoveltyalongwith currentandfuture applications for modeling and simulating the anatomical structures and functions of the human body.

TheIMC2009programconsistedofthreeinvitedtalksfrominternational- perts, four tutorials on fundamental techniques related to the conference topics, nine regular paper sessions, and a short paper / poster session. We received close to 50 submissions from 15 countries world-wide. Based on the ano- mous reviews provided by members of the international Program Committee, the Steering Committee recommended accepting 50% of the contributions as regular papers and another 15% as short papers with poster presentation. To our regret there were a few interesting papers that we had to reject. However, the reviewing results showed a high quality as well as an interesting variety of submissions. We would like to thank all authors for carefully preparing the results of their worksubmitted to IMC 2009,thus enabling an interesting and high-quality c- ferenceprogram.Moreover,wearedeeplygratefultoallmembersoftheProgram and Steering Committees for their e?orts in quickly and thoroughly evaluating the papers. Finally, our special thanks go to the organizers Ulrike Lucke and Daniel Versick for their great work.They handled all the organizationaltasks as well as the communications, the electronic submission, reviewing, and publi- tion procedure in an e? cient and timely manner.

ThepromiseoftheSemanticWeb, atits most expansive, is to allow knowledge to be freely accessed and exchanged by software. It is now recognized that if the SemanticWebis to containdeepknowledge, theneedfornewrepresentationand reasoning techniques is going to be critical. These techniques need to ?nd the righttrade-o?betweenexpressiveness, scalabilityandrobustnesstodealwiththe inherently incomplete, contradictory and uncertain nature of knowledge on the Web. The International Conference on Web Reasoning and Rule Systems (RR) was founded to address these needs and has grown into a major international forum in this area. The third RR conference was held during October 25-26, 2009 in Chantilly, Virginia, co-located with the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2009). This year 41 papers were submitted from authors in 21 countries. The P- gram Committee performed outstandingly to ensure that each paper submitted to RR 2009 was thoroughly reviewed by at least three referees in a short - riod of time. The resulting conference presented papers of high quality on many of the key issues for reasoning on the Semantic Web. RR 2009 was fortunate to have two distinguished invited speakers. Robert Kowalski, in his talk "- tegrating Logic Programming and Production Systems with Abductive Logic Programming Agents" addressed some of the fundamental considerations - hind reasoning about evolving systems. Benjamin Grossof's talk "SILK: Higher Level Rules with Defaults and Semantic Scalability" described the design of a major next-generation rule system. The invited tutorial "Uncertainty Reas- ing for the Semantic Web" by Thomas Lukasiewicz provided perspectives on a central issue in this area.

As the Web continues to grow, increasing amounts of data are being made available for human and machine consumption. This emerging Semantic Web is rapidly entering the mainstream and, as a result, a variety of new solutions for searching, aggregating and the intelligent delivery of information are being produced,bothinresearchandcommercialsettings.Severalnewchallengesarise from this context, both from a technical and human-computer interaction p- spective - e.g., as issues to do with the scalability andusability of Semantic Web solutions become particularly important. The International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) is the major inter- tional forum where the latest research results and technical innovations on all aspects of the Semantic Web are presented. ISWC brings together researchers, practitioners, and users from the areas of arti?cial intelligence, databases, social networks,distributedcomputing,Webengineering,informationsystems,natural language processing, soft computing, and human-computer interaction to d- cuss the major challenges and proposed solutions, success stories and failures, as well the visions that can advance the ?eld.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Active Media Technology, AMT 2009, held in Beijing, China, in October 2009.

The 47 revised full papers and the 6 keynote talks were carefully reviewed and selected. The papers reflect the shared forum for researchers and practitioniers from diverse fields, such as computer science, information technology, artificial intelligence, media engineering, economics, data mining, data and knowledge engineering, intelligent agent technology, human computer interaction, complex systems and systems science.

It offered new insights into the main research challenges and development of AMT by revealing the interplay between the studies of human informatics and research of informatics on the Web/Internet, mobile and wireless centric intelligent information processing systems.

Welcome to the tenth anniversary of the International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering, WISE 2009. This year the WISE conference continued the tradition that has evolved from the inaugural conference held in 2000 in Hong Kong and since then has made its journey around the world: 2001 Kyoto (Japan), 2002 Singapore, 2003 Rome (Italy), 2004 Brisbane (Australia), 2005 New York (USA), 2006 Wuhan (China), 2007 Nancy (France), and 2008 Auckland (New Zealand). This year we were happy to hold the event in Poznan, a city of 600,000 inhabitants in western Poland. Poznan is the capital of the most affluent province of the country - Wielkopolska - which means "Greater Poland". For more than 1,000 years, Poznan's geographical location has predestined the city to be a significant scientific, cultural and economic center with more than just regional influence. The city is situated on the strategic cross-roads from Paris and Berlin in the west, to Warsaw and Moscow in the east, and from Scandinavia through the Baltic Sea in the north to the Balkans in the south. Poznan is a great research and university center with a dynamic potential. In all, 140,000 students are enrolled in 26 state-run and private institutions of higher education here, among which the Poznan University of Economics with its 12,000 students is one of the biggest. The WISE 2009 Conference provided a forum for engineers and scientists to present their latest findings in Web-related technologies and solutions.

Following the very successful Motion in Games event in June 2008, we or- nized the Second International Workshop on Motion in Games (MIG) during November 21-24, 2009 in Zeist, The Netherlands. Games have become a very important medium for both education and - tertainment. Motion plays a crucial role in computer games. Characters move around, objects are manipulated or move due to physical constraints, entities are animated, and the camera moves through the scene. Even the motion of the player nowadays is used as input to games. Motion is currently studied in many di?erent areas of research, including graphics and animation, game technology, robotics, simulation, computer vision, and also physics, psychology, and urban studies. Cross-fertilizationbetween these communities can considerably advance the state of the art in this area. The goal of the workshop Motion in Games is to bring together researchers from this variety of ?elds to present the most recent results and to initiate collaboration. The workshop is organized by the Dutch research project GATE. In total, the workshop this year consisted of 27 high-quality presentations by a selection of internationally renownedspeakers in the ?eld of games and simulations. We were extremely pleased with the quality of the contributions to the MIG workshop and we look forward to organizing a follow-up MIG event.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, ECDL 2009, held in Corfu, Greece, in September/October 2009.

The 28 revised full papers and 6 revised short papers presented together with 2 panel description, the extended abstracts of 20 revised poster and 16 demo papers were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 181 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on services, infrastructures, interaction, knowledge organization systems, interfaces, resource discovery, architectures, information retrieval, preservation, and evaluation.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning, EC-TEL 2009, held in Nice, France in September/October 2009.

The 35 revised full papers, 17 short papers, and 35 posters presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 136 paper submissions and 22 poster submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on adaptation and personalization, interoperability, semantic Web, Web 2.0., data mining and social networks, collaboration and social knowledge construction, learning communities and communities of practice, learning contexts, problem and project-based learning, inquiry, learning, learning design, motivation, engagement, learning games, and human factors and evaluation.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Entertainment Computing, ICEC 2009, held in Paris, France, in September 2009, under the auspices of IFIP.

The 14 revised long papers, 19 short papers and 23 poster papers and demos presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 105 submissions for inclusion in the book.

The papers cover all main domains of entertainment computing, from interactive music to games, taking a wide range of scientific domains from aesthetic to computer science.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th IFIP/IEEE International Conference on Management of Multimedia and Mobile Networks and Services, MMNS 2009, held in Venice, Italy, in October 2009, as part of the 5th International Week on Management of Networks and Services, Manweek 2009.

The 13 revised full papers presented together with 5 poster papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 37 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on multimedia networks and systems management, multimedia quality, VoIP and vocal applications, and peer-to-peer multimedia networks.

The 13th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, HCI Inter- tional 2009, was held in San Diego, California, USA, July 19-24, 2009, jointly with the Symposium on Human Interface (Japan) 2009, the 8th International Conference on Engineering Psychology and Cognitive Ergonomics, the 5th International Conference on Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction, the Third International Conf- ence on Virtual and Mixed Reality, the Third International Conference on Internati- alization, Design and Global Development, the Third International Conference on Online Communities and Social Computing, the 5th International Conference on Augmented Cognition, the Second International Conference on Digital Human Mod- ing, and the First International Conference on Human Centered Design. A total of 4,348 individuals from academia, research institutes, industry and gove- mental agencies from 73 countries submitted contributions, and 1,397 papers that were judged to be of high scientific quality were included in the program. These papers - dress the latest research and development efforts and highlight the human aspects of the design and use of computing systems. The papers accepted for presentation thoroughly cover the entire field of human-computer interaction, addressing major advances in knowledge and effective use of computers in a variety of application areas.

CMMR is an annual event focusing on important aspects of computer music. CMMR 2008 was the ?fth event in this series and was co-organized by A- borg University Esbjerg, Denmark (http://www.aaue.dk), the Laboratoire de M' ecanique et d'Acoustique, CNRS in Marseille, France (http:/www.lma.cn- mrs.fr) and the Network for Cross-Disciplinary Studies of Music and Meaning, University of Southern Denmark (http://www.ntsmb.dk/). The conference was held in Copenhagen, May 19-23, 2008. The four previous editions of CMMR gathered a large number of notew- thy papers by researchers from the ?eld of computer music. The proceedings of these conferences were published in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series (LNCS 2771, LNCS 3310, LNCS 3902 and LNCS 4969). The present e- tion follows the lineage of the previous ones, including a collection of 21 papers specially reviewed and corrected for this proceedings volume. The ?eld of computer music embraces a large number of research areas that span from information retrieval, programming, arti?cial intelligence to aco- tics, signal processing and sound modeling. In the last CMMR gatherings an increased emphasis was placed on the role of human interaction at all levels of musicalpractice,aswellasperceptualandcognitiveaspects inorderto establish relationsbetweenthestructureofsoundsandtheirimpactonhumanbeings.The identi?cation of perceptually relevant sound structures is linked to the notion of the sense of sounds, which was the title of the CMMR 2007 conference.

This volume contains the proceedings of UIC 2009, the 6th International C- ference on Ubiquitous Intelligence and Computing: Building Smart Worlds in Real and Cyber Spaces. The UIC 2009 conference was technically co-sponsored by the IEEE and the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Scalable Computing. The conference was also sponsored by the Australian Centre of - cellence in Information and Communication Technologies (NICTA). UIC 2009 was accompanied by six workshops on a variety of research challenges within the area of ubiquitous intelligence and computing. The conference was held in Brisbane, Australia, July 7-9, 2009. The event was the sixth meeting of this conference series. USW 2005 (First International Workshop on Ubiquitous Smart World), held in March 2005 in Taiwan, was the ?rst event in the series. This event was followed by UISW 2005 (Second International Symposium on Ubiquitous Intelligence and Smart Worlds) held in December 2005 in Japan. Since 2006, the conference has been held annually under the name UIC (International Conference on Ubiquitous Intelligence and Computing). UIC 2006 was held in September 2006 in Wuhan andThreeGorges, China, followedbyUIC2007heldinJuly2007inHongKong, and UIC 2008 held in June 2008 in Oslo, Norway. Ubiquitous sensors, computers, networksand informationare paving the way towardasmartworldinwhichcomputationalintelligenceisdistributedthrou- out the physical environment to provide reliable and relevant services to peop

With great pleasure we present the second volume of the new journal Trans- tions on Edutainment. This journal, part of the Springer series Lecture Notes in ComputerScience,isdevotedtoresearchanddevelopmentinthe?eldofeduta- ment. Edutainment, also known as educational entertainment or entertainme- education, denotes all forms of entertainment designed to educate as well as to provide fun. This approach is motivated by the increasing demands on indivi- alsforlife-longlearningandtheneedtointegratee?ectivelearningopportunities throughout life. As such, edutainment has attracted increasing interest in the last few years. The ?rst ?ve articles of this issue represent a selection of outstanding cont- butionsfromGDTW2008,the6thInternationalConferenceinGameDesignand Technology held in the UK, in November 2008. The main aims of the workshop are: (1) To provide a forum to discuss state-of-the-art games design and current and future games technology with the specialists. (2) To enable academics and researchersincomputergametechnologyandcomputerentertainmenttopresent their work during the research sessions, and to seek opportunities for collabo- tion with industry and for academic researchpartners. (3) To facilitate relati- ships and collaboration between academics promoting computer games techn- ogy courses, the UK games industry and supporting organizations. These ?ve papers cover mainly the topic of edutainment platforms or methodology: "Co- dinating Heterogeneous Game-Based Learning Approaches in Online Learning Environments," "Networking Middleware and Online-Deployment Mechanisms for Java-Based Games," "A Testbed for P2P Gaming Using Time Warp, How to Steer Characters in Group Games," and "Time-Based Personalized Mobile Game Downloading. " The next six articles represent a selection of outstanding contributions from Cyberworlds 2008 held in Hangzhou, China, in September 2008.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Web Engineering, ICWE 2009, held in San Sebastian, Spain in June 2009. The 22 revised full papers and 15 revised short papers presented together with 8 posters and 10 demonstration papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 90 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on accessibility and usability, component-based web engineering: portals and mashups, data and semantics, model-driven web engineering, navigation, process, planning and phases, quality, rich internet applications, search, testing, web services, SOA and REST, and web 2.0.

This two volume set LNCS 5981 and LNCS 5982 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications, DASFAA 2010, held in Tsukuba, Japan, in April 2010. The 39 revised full papers and 16 revised short papers presented together with 3 invited keynote papers, 22 demonstration papers, 6 industrial papers, and 2 keynote talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 285 submissions. The papers of the first volume are organized in topical sections on P2P-based technologies, data mining technologies, XML search and matching, graphs, spatialdatabases, XML technologies, time series and streams, advanced data mining, query processing, Web, sensor networks and communications, information management, as well as communities and Web graphs. The second volume contains contributions related to trajectories and moving objects, skyline queries, privacy and security, data streams, similarity search and event processing, storage and advanced topics, industrial, demo papers, and tutorials and panels.

These are the proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Intelligent Technologies for Interactive Entertainment (INTETAIN 09). The ?rst edition of this conference, organised in Madonna di Campiglio, saw the gathering of a diverse audience with broad and varied interests. With presentations on topics ranging from underlying technology to intelligent interaction and entertainment applications, several inspiring invited lectures, a demonstration session and a hands-on design garage, that ?rst edition of INTETAIN generated a lot of - teraction between participants in a lively atmosphere. We hope that we have managed to continue this direction with the third edition, which will take place in Amsterdam,following the secondedition heldin Cancun. ' The submissions for short and long papers this year show a certain focus on topics such as emergent games, exertion interfaces and embodied interaction, but also cover important topicsofthepreviouseditions,suchas,a?ectiveuserinterfaces,storytelling,s- sors, tele-presence in entertainment, animation, edutainment, and (interactive) art. The presentationof the accepted papers,together with the manyinteractive demonstrations of entertainment and art installations, and other participative activities to be held during the conference, should go some way towards recre- ing the open and interactive atmosphere that has been the goal of INTETAIN since its beginning. In addition to the aforementioned papers and demonstrations, we are happy to presentcontributionsfrom threeexcellent invitedspeakersfor INTETAIN 09.

Smartgraphicsarepervasivein ourlives nowadays.Thewaysartistsand desi- ersproduceimagesthate?ectivelysupporthumancognitionandcommunication are continuously changing and evolving as they incorporate novel methods p- vided by the advances in science and technology. As a counterpart, the radically new visions in most art forms have stimulated scientists to breath-taking levels of achievement. This symbiotic relationship between art and science (and technology) is one of the foundations of the technological culture of contemporary society and is especiallyevidentinthecreationofsmartgraphics.Suchaprocessrestsonadeep understanding of the fundamentals of perception and cognition as they relate to interaction and communication technologies, together with arti?cial intelligence andcomputergraphicstechniques, toautomatereasoningandenhancecognition. The International Symposium on Smart Graphics 2009 was held from May 28-30 in Salamanca, Spain. With this edition we celebrated our tenth anniv- sary: a successful series of inspiring and exciting meetings originating in 2000 as an American Association for Arti?cial Intelligence Spring Symposium. This year we proposed a speci?c emphasis on visual analytics as well as all kinds of transversalresearchthat harnesses the power of humans and technol- icalartifacts in order to convey, understandanddeal with complex scienti?c and socialprocesses.Wewereluckyto haveDanielKeim andJ] ornKohlhammer, two internationally renowned experts on this area of research, as invited speakers

Die 16. GI/ITG-Fachtagung Kommunikation in Verteilten Systemen (KiVS 2009) befasst sich als wichtigstes deutschsprachiges Forum fur Forschung und Entwicklung auf den Gebieten Kommunikation und Verteilte Systeme mit einer grossen Vielfalt von innovativen und zukunftsorientierten Fragestellungen. Sie spannt dabei einen Bogen von allgegenwartigen verteilten Anwendungen uber Middleware-Konzepte und Protokolltechniken bis hin zu modernen Netztechniken mit ihren Mobilitats- und Sicherheitsfragen. Die KiVS dient der Standortbestimmung aktueller Entwicklungen, der Prasentation laufender Forschungsarbeiten und der Diskussion zukunftstrachtiger Ansatze fur die Kommunikation in Verteilten Systemen. "