This book constitutes the proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Social Informatics, SocInfo 2012, held in Lausanne, Switzerland, in December 2012. The 21 full papers, 18 short papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 61 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections named: social choice mechanisms in the e-society, computational models of social phenomena, social simulation, web mining and its social interpretations, algorithms and protocols inspired by human societies, socio-economic systems and applications, trust, privacy, risk and security in social contexts.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the First International Symposium on Data-Driven Process Discovery and Analysis held in Campione d'Italia, Italy, in June/July 2011. The 11 revised full papers were carefully selected from 31 submissions. In addition to the thorough review process, the lively discussions at the event itself also helped the authors to improve their papers and to foster interesting extensions. The selected papers cover a wide range of topics spanning from theoretical issues related to process representation to practical experience in process discovery and analysis.

Semantic Issues in e-Commerce Systems comprises the proceedings of the Ninth Working Conference on Database Semantics, which was sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and held in Hong Kong in April 2001. This volume will be essential for researchers and practitioners working in the areas of database management, information retrieval and data mining, and user interfaces, as applied to e-commerce.

This lecture introduces systematically into the problem of managing large data collections in peer-to-peer systems. Search over large datasets has always been a key problem in peer-to-peer systems and the peer-to-peer paradigm has incited novel directions in the field of data management. This resulted in many novel peer-to-peer data management concepts and algorithms, for supporting data management tasks in a wider sense, including data integration, document management and text retrieval. The lecture covers four different types of peer-to-peer data management systems that are characterized by the type of data they manage and the search capabilities they support. The first type are structured peer-to-peer data management systems which support structured query capabilities for standard data models. The second type are peer-to-peer data integration systems for querying of heterogeneous databases without requiring a common global schema. The third type are peer-to-peer document retrieval systems that enable document search based both on the textual content and the document structure. Finally, we introduce semantic overlay networks, which support similarity search on information represented in hierarchically organized and multi-dimensional semantic spaces. Topics that go beyond data representation and search are summarized at the end of the lecture. Table of Contents: Introduction / Structured Peer-to-Peer Databases / Peer-to-peer Data Integration / Peer-to-peer Retrieval / Semantic Overlay Networks / Conclusion

Peer-to-peer(P2P)computingiscurrentlyattractingenormousmediaattention, spurred by the popularity of ?le sharing systems such as Napster, Gnutella and Morpheus. In P2P systems a very large number of autonomous computing nodes (the peers) pool together their resources and rely on each other for data and services. The wealth of business opportunities promised by P2P networks has gene- ted much industrial interest recently, and has resulted in the creation of various industrial projects, startup companies, and special interest groups. Researchers from distributed computing, networks, agents and databases have also become excited about the P2P vision, and papers tackling open problems in this area have started appearing in high-quality conferences and workshops. Much of the recent research on P2P systems seems to be carried out by - search groups with a primary interest in distributed computation and networks. This workshop concentrated on the impact that current database research can have on P2P computing and vice versa. Although researchers in distributed data structures and databases have been working on related issues for a long time, the developed techniques are simply not adequate for the new paradigm.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the joint 6th International Semantic Web Conference, ISWC 2007, and the 2nd Asian Semantic Web Conference, ASWC 2007, held in Busan, Korea, in November 2007.

The 50 revised full academic papers and 12 revised application papers presented together with 5 Semantic Web Challenge papers and 12 selected doctoral consortium articles were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 257 submitted papers to the academic track and 29 to the applications track. The papers address all current issues in the field of the semantic Web, ranging from theoretical and foundational aspects to various applied topics such as management of semantic Web data, ontologies, semantic Web architecture, social semantic Web, as well as applications of the semantic Web. Short descriptions of the top five winning applications submitted to the Semantic Web Challenge competition conclude the volume.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering, WISE 2006, held in Wuhan, China in October 2006. The 37 revised full papers and 17 revised short papers presented together with three invited lectures were carefully reviewed and selected from 183 submissions.

* Data warehousing and semantic data mining * Spatial, temporal, multimedia and multimodal semantics * Semantics in data visualization * Semantic services for mobile users * Supporting tools * Applications of semantic-driven approaches These topics are to be understood as speci?cally related to semantic issues. Contributions submitted to the journal and dealing with semantics of data will be considered even if they are not within the topics in the list. While the physical appearanceof the journal issues looks like the books from the well-known Springer LNCS series, the mode of operation is that of a jo- nal. Contributions can be freely submitted by authors and are reviewed by the Editorial Board. Contributions may also be invited, and nevertheless carefully reviewed, as in the case for issues that contain extended versions of best papers from major conferences addressing data semantics issues. Special issues, foc- ing on a speci?c topic, are coordinated by guest editors once the proposal for a special issue is accepted by the Editorial Board. Finally, it is also possible that a journal issue be devoted to a single text. The journal published its ?rst volumein 2003(LNCS 2800),its secondvolume at the beginning of 2005(LNCS 3360), and its third volume in Summer 2005 (LNCS 3534). Volumes I, II and V are special issues composed of selected extended versions of best conference papers. Volume III is a special issue on Semantic-Based Geographical Infor- tion Systems, coordinated by guest editor Esteban Zim anyi.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing is attracting enormous media attention, spurred by the popularity of file sharing systems such as Napster, Gnutella, and Morpheus. The peers are autonomous, or as some call them, first-class citizens. P2P networks are emerging as a new distributed computing paradigm for their potential to harness the computing power of the hosts composing the network and make their under-utilized resources available to others. Although researchers working on distributed computing, multiagent systems, databases and networks have been using similar concepts for a long time, it is only recently that papers motivated by the current P2P paradigm have started appearing in high-quality conferences and workshops. Research in agent systems in particular appears to be most relevant because, since their inception, multiagent systems have always been thought of as networks of peers. The multiagent paradigm can thus be superimposed on the P2P architecture, where agents embody the description of the task environments, the decision-support capabilities, the collective behavior, and the interaction protocols of each peer. The emphasis in this context on decentralization, user autonomy, ease and speed of growth that gives P2P its advantages also leads to significant potential problems. Most prominent among these problems are coordination, the ability of an agent to make decisions on its own actions in the context of activities of other agents, and scalability, the value of the P2P systems lies in how well they scale along several dimensions, including complexity, heterogeneity of peers, robustness, traffic redistribution, and so on.

This volume presents the fully revised papers presented at the Third International Workshop on Agents and Peer-to-Peer Computing, AP2PC 2004, held in New York City on July 19, 2004 in the context of the Third International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS 2004). The volume is organized in topical sections on P2P networks and search performance, emergent communities and social behaviours, semantic integration, mobile P2P systems, adaptive systems, agent-based resource discovery, as well as trust and reputation.

Peer-to-peer(P2P)computingiscurrentlyattractingenormousmediaattention, spurred by the popularity of ?le sharing systems such as Napster, Gnutella and Morpheus. In P2P systems a very large number of autonomous computing nodes (the peers) pool together their resources and rely on each other for data and services. The wealth of business opportunities promised by P2P networks has gene- ted much industrial interest recently, and has resulted in the creation of various industrial projects, startup companies, and special interest groups. Researchers from distributed computing, networks, agents and databases have also become excited about the P2P vision, and papers tackling open problems in this area have started appearing in high-quality conferences and workshops. Much of the recent research on P2P systems seems to be carried out by - search groups with a primary interest in distributed computation and networks. This workshop concentrated on the impact that current database research can have on P2P computing and vice versa. Although researchers in distributed data structures and databases have been working on related issues for a long time, the developed techniques are simply not adequate for the new paradigm.

This book constitutes the ?rst volume of the ?rst journal in the new LNCS Jo- nalSubline, theJournalonDataSemantics. Publishingajournalinabookseries might come as a surprise to customers, readers, and librarians, thus we would like to provide some background information and our motivation for introducing this new LNCS subline. As a consequence of the very tight interaction between the Lecture Notes in ComputerScienceseriesandtheinternationalcomputerscienceresearchand- velopment community, we receive quite a few proposals for new archive journals. From the successful launch of workshops or conferences and publication of their proceedings in the LNCS series, it might seem like a natural step to approach the publisher about launching a journal once this speci?c ?eld has gained a c- tain level of maturity and stability. Each year we receive about a dozen such proposals and even more informal inquiries. Like other publishers, it has been our experience that launching a new jo- nal and making it a long-term success is a hard job nowadays, due to a generally di?cult market situation, and library budget restrictions in particular. Because many of the proceedings in LNCS, and especially many of the LNCS postp- ceedings, apply the same strict reviewing and selection criteria as established journals, we started discussing with proposers of new journals the alternative of devoting a few volumes in LNCS to their ?eld, instead of going through the painful Sisyphean adventure of establishing a new journal on its own

E-commerce systems involve a complex interaction between Web Based Internet related software, application software and databases. It is clear that the success of e-commerce systems is going to be dependent not only on the technology of these systems but also on the quality of the underlying databases and supporting processes. Whilst databases have achieved considerable success in the wider marketplace, the main research effort has been on tools and techniques for high volume but based on relatively simplistic record management. The modern advanced e-commerce systems require a paradigm shift to allow the meaningful representation and manipulation of complex business information on the Web and Internet. This requires the development of new methodologies, environments and tools to allow one to easily understand the underlying structure to facilitate access, manipulation and modification of such information. An essential characteristic to gain understanding and interoperability is a clearly defined semantics for e-commerce systems and databases.
The focus of this volume is therefore on those issues of e-commerce systems that involve the semantics of the information represented, stored and manipulated by these systems. This not only includes methodologies for application domain modeling, formal representations of e-commerce aspects of knowledge, the role of semantics, Internet based transmission and display of data, etc. but also issues in user interfacing and process modeling, architectures that better enable integrity, consistency, interoperation reuse of components, or reports on prototypes illustrating new aspects of such systems from a semantically relevant viewpoint.
Semantic Issues in e-Commerce Systems comprises the proceedings of the Ninth Working Conference on Database Semantics, which was sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and held in Hong Kong in April 2001.
This volume will be essential for researchers and practitioners working in the areas of database management, information retrieval and data mining, and user interfaces, as applied to e-commerce.