The Handbook of Service Description introduces an in-depth overview of service description efforts. The book also highlights the recent Unified Service Description Language (USDL) in detail and discusses its methods.

The Handbook of Service Description is the normative scientific reference for the upcoming standardization of the Unified Service Description Language (USDL). Complete documentation is included.

The Handbook of Service Description is designed for those working in the service science industry as a reference book. Advanced-level students focused on computer science, engineering and business will also find this book a valuable asset.

Current middleware solutions, e.g., application servers and Web services, are very complex software products that are hard to tame because of intricacies of distributed systems. Their functionalities have mostly been developed and managed with the help of administration tools and corresponding configuration files, recently in XML. Though this constitutes flexibility for developing and administrating a distributed application, the conceptual model underlying the different configurations is only implicit.

To remedy such problems, Semantic Management of Middleware contributes an ontology-based approach to support the development and administration of middleware-based applications. The ontology is an explicit conceptual model with formal logic-based semantics. Its descriptions may therefore be queried, may foresight required actions, or may be checked to avoid inconsistent system configurations.

This book builds a rigorous approach towards giving the declarative descriptions of components and services a well-defined meaning by specifying ontological foundations and by showing how such foundations may be realized in practical, up-and-running systems.

The Handbook of Service Description introduces an in-depth overview of service description efforts. The book also highlights the recent Unified Service Description Language (USDL) in detail and discusses its methods.

The Handbook of Service Description is the normative scientific reference for the upcoming standardization of the Unified Service Description Language (USDL). Complete documentation is included.

The Handbook of Service Description is designed for those working in the service science industry as a reference book. Advanced-level students focused on computer science, engineering and business will also find this book a valuable asset.

Current middleware solutions, e.g., application servers and Web services, are very complex software products that are hard to tame because of intricacies of distributed systems. Their functionalities have mostly been developed and managed with the help of administration tools and corresponding configuration files, recently in XML. Though this constitutes flexibility for developing and administrating a distributed application, the conceptual model underlying the different configurations is only implicit.

To remedy such problems, Semantic Management of Middleware contributes an ontology-based approach to support the development and administration of middleware-based applications. The ontology is an explicit conceptual model with formal logic-based semantics. Its descriptions may therefore be queried, may foresight required actions, or may be checked to avoid inconsistent system configurations.

This book builds a rigorous approach towards giving the declarative descriptions of components and services a well-defined meaning by specifying ontological foundations and by showing how such foundations may be realized in practical, up-and-running systems.

Im Internet werden Informationen immer h ufiger so ausgezeichnet, dass sie f r Computer interpretierbar sind (Semantic Web). Solche maschinenlesbaren Informationen sorgen daf r, dass Dienste im Internet verf gbar gemacht und gefunden werden k nnen. Diese Automatisierung schafft eine neue Rechtslage und stellt sowohl f r die Rechtspflege als auch f r Gesch ftspartner eine Herausforderung dar. In dem Band pr sentieren die Autoren eine automatisierte Rechtsfolgenermittlung als praxisrelevanten Ansatz zur Herstellung von Rechtssicherheit.

The study reported in this paper is an ongoing effort. We reported a preliminary analysis of the data in the paper. The current experiments varied the subjects to c- duct online group learning activities by the communication media such as email and threaded discussion. Although, we could have easily learned the impact of mobile devices in learning if we divided the subjects to use different hardware such as p- sonal computers, personal digital assistant, or mobile phones, we believe our findings will still be able to provide useful insights on the difficulties that the mobile learners will face in solving problems as a group. Our analysis result will also provide ba- line information on whether the traits of the successful or failed online groups are applicable to the mobile learners. For example, we expect the SMS will be a better medium to overcome the major problem of instant communication or the rapid propagation of the information as the mobile phones have built-in mechanism to remind the users of the incoming new messages and also the mobile phone users are expected to be interrupted for the incoming messages. However, we need further investigation of other problems, which hinder the optimum online group work. For example, 'accuracy of the transferred information' was identified as one of the pr- lems of using emails as the communication medium. Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) or SMS are more apt to deliver shorter messages than the typical emails.