This book provides detailed descriptions of big data solutions for activity detection and forecasting of very large numbers of moving entities spread across large geographical areas. It presents state-of-the-art methods for processing, managing, detecting and predicting trajectories and important events related to moving entities, together with advanced visual analytics methods, over multiple heterogeneous, voluminous, fluctuating and noisy data streams from moving entities, correlating them with data from archived data sources expressing e.g. entities' characteristics, geographical information, mobility patterns, mobility regulations and intentional data. The book is divided into six parts: Part I discusses the motivation and background of mobility forecasting supported by trajectory-oriented analytics, and includes specific problems and challenges in the aviation (air-traffic management) and the maritime domains. Part II focuses on big data quality assessment and processing, and presents novel technologies suitable for mobility analytics components. Next, Part III describes solutions toward processing and managing big spatio-temporal data, particularly enriching data streams and integrating streamed and archival data to provide coherent views of mobility, and storing of integrated mobility data in large distributed knowledge graphs for efficient query-answering. Part IV focuses on mobility analytics methods exploiting (online) processed, synopsized and enriched data streams as well as (offline) integrated, archived mobility data, and highlights future location and trajectory prediction methods, distinguishing between short-term and more challenging long-term predictions. Part V examines how methods addressing data management, data processing and mobility analytics are integrated in big data architectures with distinctive characteristics compared to other known big data paradigmatic architectures. Lastly, Part VI covers important ethical issues that research on mobility analytics should address. Providing novel approaches and methodologies related to mobility detection and forecasting needs based on big data exploration, processing, storage, and analysis, this book will appeal to computer scientists and stakeholders in various application domains.

The 8th edition of the International Symposium on Web and Wireless Geograp- cal Information Systems (W2GIS 2008) was held in December 2008, in the vibrant city of Shanghai, China. This annual symposium aims at providing a forum for discussing advances on recent developments and research results in the ?eld of Web and wireless geographical information systems. Promoted from workshop to s- posium in 2005, W2GIS now represents a prestigious event within this dynamic research community. These proceedings contain the papers selected for presen- tion at this international event. For the 2008 edition, we received 38 submissions from 16 countries. All subm- ted papers were related to topics of interest to the symposium. Each paper received three reviews. Based on these reviews, 14 papers were selected for presentation and inclusion in the proceedings. The accepted papers are all of excellent quality and cover topics that range from mobile networks and location-based services, to contextual representation and mapping, to geospatial Web techniques, to object tracking in Web and mobile environments. We wish to thank all authors that contributed to this symposium for the high quality of their papers and presentations. Our sincere thanks go to Springer's LNCS team. We would also like to acknowledge and thank the Program C- mittee members for the quality and timeliness of their reviews. Finally, many thanks to the Steering Committee members for providing continuous support and advice.

This book provides detailed descriptions of big data solutions for activity detection and forecasting of very large numbers of moving entities spread across large geographical areas. It presents state-of-the-art methods for processing, managing, detecting and predicting trajectories and important events related to moving entities, together with advanced visual analytics methods, over multiple heterogeneous, voluminous, fluctuating and noisy data streams from moving entities, correlating them with data from archived data sources expressing e.g. entities' characteristics, geographical information, mobility patterns, mobility regulations and intentional data. The book is divided into six parts: Part I discusses the motivation and background of mobility forecasting supported by trajectory-oriented analytics, and includes specific problems and challenges in the aviation (air-traffic management) and the maritime domains. Part II focuses on big data quality assessment and processing, and presents novel technologies suitable for mobility analytics components. Next, Part III describes solutions toward processing and managing big spatio-temporal data, particularly enriching data streams and integrating streamed and archival data to provide coherent views of mobility, and storing of integrated mobility data in large distributed knowledge graphs for efficient query-answering. Part IV focuses on mobility analytics methods exploiting (online) processed, synopsized and enriched data streams as well as (offline) integrated, archived mobility data, and highlights future location and trajectory prediction methods, distinguishing between short-term and more challenging long-term predictions. Part V examines how methods addressing data management, data processing and mobility analytics are integrated in big data architectures with distinctive characteristics compared to other known big data paradigmatic architectures. Lastly, Part VI covers important ethical issues that research on mobility analytics should address. Providing novel approaches and methodologies related to mobility detection and forecasting needs based on big data exploration, processing, storage, and analysis, this book will appeal to computer scientists and stakeholders in various application domains.

The 78 Division - known from its divisional emblem as 'the Battleaxe Division' - was formed in Scotland in 1942 with the aim of landing in North Africa later that year. Within six months, the disparate elements had been welded together and were on their way to take part in 'Operation Torch' - the Anglo-American landings in Algeria. From there, the division fought its way east into the hotly defended defiles and deserts of Tunisia - where their formidable opponents were the battle-hardened Afrika Korps. The division held the line against German counter attacks through the long and bitter winter of 1942/43 before liberating Tunis and preparing for landfall on the European mainland by way of Sicily. The hard-fought slogging match of the Italian campaign followed, with the 78th taking part in the battle of Cassino, the liberation of Rome and the final push through the mountains of north-east Italy into Austria. Based on divisional war diaries, this is an exceptional history of a gruelling series of campaigns fought by a unit that learned on the job.