This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Web-Age Information Management, WAIM 2012, held in Harbin, China in August 2012. The 32 revised full papers presented together with 10 short papers and three keynotes were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 178 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on wireless sensor networks; data warehousing and data mining; query processing; spatial databases; similarity search and queries; XML and Web data; graph and uncertain data; distributed computing; data security and management; information extraction and integration; and social networks and modern Web services.

Biodiesel Soot: Tribology, Properties, and Formation covers the basic properties of biodiesel soot, focusing particularly on its tribological behaviors, dispersion characteristics, and techniques for controlling and altering its tribological and material behavior. The book begins with a concise overview of the fundamentals of the properties and preparation of biodiesel, including coverage of the processes involved in the formation of soot particulates, the influence of different fuels on formation, and the effects of different soot on air pollution, friction reduction, and wear resistance of lubricating oil. Other sections cover the influence of biodiesel soot on engine parts and combustion devices. This book will be of particular interest to graduate students and academic or industrial researchers in materials science, as well as mechanical, automotive and chemical engineering.

Natural language interfaces provide an easy way to query and interact with data and enable non-technical users to investigate data sets without the need to know a query language. Recent advances in natural language understanding and processing have resulted in a renewed interest in natural language interfaces to data. The main challenges in natural language querying are identifying the entities involved in the user utterance, connecting the different entities in a meaningful way over the underlying data source to interpret user intents, and generating a structured query. There are two main approaches in the literature for interpreting a user's natural language query. The first are rule-based systems that make use of semantic indices, ontologies, and knowledge graphs to identify the entities in the query, understand the intended relationships between those entities, and utilize grammars to generate the target queries. Second are hybrid approaches that utilize both rule-based techniques as well as deep learning models. Conversational interfaces are the next natural step to one-shot natural language querying by exploiting query context between multiple turns of conversation for disambiguation. In this monograph, the authors review the rule-based and hybrid technologies that are used in natural language interfaces and survey the different approaches to natural language querying. They also describe conversational interfaces for data analytics and discuss several benchmarks used for natural language querying research and evaluation. The monograph concludes with discussion on challenges that need to be addressed before these systems can be widely adopted.