This book presents a proposal for designing business process management (BPM) systems that comprise much more than just process modelling. Based on a purified Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) variant, the authors present proposals for several important issues in BPM that have not been adequately considered in the BPMN 2.0 standard. It focusses on modality as well as actor and user interaction modelling and offers an enhanced communication concept. In order to render models executable, the semantics of the modelling language needs to be described rigorously enough to prevent deviating interpretations by different tools. For this reason, the semantics of the necessary concepts introduced in this book are defined using the Abstract State Machine (ASM) method. Finally, the authors show how the different parts of the model fit together using a simple example process, and introduce the enhanced Process Platform (eP2) architecture, which binds all the different components together. The resulting method is named Hagenberg Business Process Modelling (H-BPM) after the Austrian village where it was designed. The motivation for the development of the H-BPM method stems from several industrial projects in which business analysts and software developers struggled with redundancies and inconsistencies in system documentation due to missing integration. The book is aimed at researchers in business process management and industry 4.0 as well as advanced professionals in these areas.

The papers in this volume aim at obtaining a common understanding of the challenging research questions in web applications comprising web information systems, web services, and web interoperability; obtaining a common understanding of verification needs in web applications; achieving a common understanding of the available rigorous approaches to system development, and the cases in which they have succeeded; identifying how rigorous software engineering methods can be exploited to develop suitable web applications; and at developing a European-scale research agenda combining theory, methods and tools that would lead to suitable web applications with the potential to implement systems for computation in the public domain.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed short papers, workshops and Doctoral Consortium papers of the 20th East European Conference on Advances in Databases and Information Systems, ADBIS 2016, held in Prague, Czech Republic, in August 2016. The 11 short papers and one historical paper were carefully selected and reviewed from 85 submissions. The rest of papers was selected from reviewing processes of 2 workshops and Doctoral Consortium. The papers are organized in topical sections on ADBIS Short Papers, Third International Workshop on Big Data Applications and Principles (BigDap 2016), Second International Workshop on Data Centered Smart Applications (DCSA 2016) and ADBIS Doctoral Consortium.

This book presents a proposal for designing business process management (BPM) systems that comprise much more than just process modelling. Based on a purified Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) variant, the authors present proposals for several important issues in BPM that have not been adequately considered in the BPMN 2.0 standard. It focusses on modality as well as actor and user interaction modelling and offers an enhanced communication concept. In order to render models executable, the semantics of the modelling language needs to be described rigorously enough to prevent deviating interpretations by different tools. For this reason, the semantics of the necessary concepts introduced in this book are defined using the Abstract State Machine (ASM) method. Finally, the authors show how the different parts of the model fit together using a simple example process, and introduce the enhanced Process Platform (eP2) architecture, which binds all the different components together. The resulting method is named Hagenberg Business Process Modelling (H-BPM) after the Austrian village where it was designed. The motivation for the development of the H-BPM method stems from several industrial projects in which business analysts and software developers struggled with redundancies and inconsistencies in system documentation due to missing integration. The book is aimed at researchers in business process management and industry 4.0 as well as advanced professionals in these areas.

The papers in this volume aim at obtaining a common understanding of the challenging research questions in web applications comprising web information systems, web services, and web interoperability; obtaining a common understanding of verification needs in web applications; achieving a common understanding of the available rigorous approaches to system development, and the cases in which they have succeeded; identifying how rigorous software engineering methods can be exploited to develop suitable web applications; and at developing a European-scale research agenda combining theory, methods and tools that would lead to suitable web applications with the potential to implement systems for computation in the public domain.

This book provides the most complete formal specification of the semantics of the Business Process Model and Notation 2.0 standard (BPMN) available to date, in a style that is easily understandable for a wide range of readers - not only for experts in formal methods, but e.g. also for developers of modeling tools, software architects, or graduate students specializing in business process management. BPMN - issued by the Object Management Group - is a widely used standard for business process modeling. However, major drawbacks of BPMN include its limited support for organizational modeling, its only implicit expression of modalities, and its lack of integrated user interaction and data modeling. Further, in many cases the syntactical and, in particular, semantic definitions of BPMN are inaccurate, incomplete or inconsistent. The book addresses concrete issues concerning the execution semantics of business processes and provides a formal definition of BPMN process diagrams, which can serve as a sound basis for further extensions, i.e., in the form of horizontal refinements of the core language. To this end, the Abstract State Machine (ASMs) method is used to formalize the semantics of BPMN. ASMs have demonstrated their value in various domains, e.g. specifying the semantics of programming or modeling languages, verifying the specification of the Java Virtual Machine, or formalizing the ITIL change management process. This kind of improvement promotes more consistency in the interpretation of comprehensive models, as well as real exchangeability of models between different tools. In the outlook at the end of the book, the authors conclude with proposing extensions that address actor modeling (including an intuitive way to denote permissions and obligations), integration of user-centric views, a refined communication concept, and data integration.

This volume contains proceedings of the Case Study Track, held at the 4th International Conference, ABZ 2014, in Toulouse, France, in June 2014. The 11 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. They use different formal techniques: B, ASM, Fiacre. They also propose different kinds of verification such as proof, model checking, test generation, run-time monitoring, and simulation.

The LNCS journal Transactions on Large-Scale Data- and Knowledge-Centered Systems focuses on data management, knowledge discovery, and knowledge processing, which are core and hot topics in computer science. Since the 1990s, the Internet has become the main driving force behind application development in all domains. An increase in the demand for resource sharing across different sites connected through networks has led to an evolution of data- and knowledge-management systems from centralized systems to decentralized systems enabling large-scale distributed applications providing high scalability. Current decentralized systems still focus on data and knowledge as their main resource. Feasibility of these systems relies basically on P2P (peer-to-peer) techniques and the support of agent systems with scaling and decentralized control. Synergy between grids, P2P systems, and agent technologies is the key to data-and knowledge-centered systems in large-scale environments. This, the 10th issue of Transactions on Large-Scale Data- and Knowledge-Centered Systems, contains seven full papers chosen following two additional rounds of reviewing from revised and extended versions of a selection of papers presented at DEXA 2012. Topics covered include formal modelling and verification of web services, incremental computation of skyline queries, the implication problem for XML keys, lossless data compression, declarative view selection methods, time awareness in recommender systems, and network data mining."

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Semantics in Data and Knowledge Bases, SDKB 2011, held in July 2011 in Zurich, Switzerland. The 8 revised full papers presented were carefully selected from numerous submissions covering topics of formal models for data and knowledge bases, integrity constraints maintenance and dependency theory, formal methods for data and knowledge base design, reasoning about data and knowledge base dynamics, adaptivity for personalised data and knowledge bases view-centered data- and knowledge-intensive systems, information integration in data and knowledge bases, knowledge discovery in data and knowledge bases, validation and verification of data and knowledge base designs, formal linguistics for data and knowledge bases, logical and mathematical foundations of semantics, semantics in data- and knowledge-intensive applications.

Fundamentals of Information Systems contains articles from the 7th International Workshop on Foundations of Models and Languages for Data and Objects (FoMLaDO '98), which was held in Timmel, Germany. These articles capture various aspects of database and information systems theory: * identification as a primitive of database models * deontic action programs * marked nulls in queries * topological canonization in spatial databases * complexity of search queries * complexity of Web queries * attribute grammars for structured document queries * hybrid multi-level concurrency control * efficient navigation in persistent object stores * formal semantics of UML * reengineering of object bases and integrity dependence . Fundamentals of Information Systems serves as an excellent reference, providing insight into some of the most challenging research issues in the field.

The LNCS journal Transactions on Large-Scale Data- and Knowledge-Centered Systems focuses on data management, knowledge discovery, and knowledge processing, which are core and hot topics in computer science. Since the 1990s, the Internet has become the main driving force behind application development in all domains. An increase in the demand for resource sharing across different sites connected through networks has led to an evolution of data- and knowledge-management systems from centralized systems to decentralized systems enabling large-scale distributed applications providing high scalability. Current decentralized systems still focus on data and knowledge as their main resource. Feasibility of these systems relies basically on P2P (peer-to-peer) techniques and the support of agent systems with scaling and decentralized control. Synergy between grids, P2P systems, and agent technologies is the key to data- and knowledge-centered systems in large-scale environments. This, the sixth issue of Transactions on Large-Scale Data- and Knowledge-Centered Systems, contains eight extended and revised versions of papers selected from those presented at DEXA 2011. Topics covered include skyline queries, probabilistic logics and reasoning, theory of conceptual modeling, prediction in networks of moving objects, validation of XML integrity constraints, management of loosely structured multi-dimensional data, data discovery in the presence of annotations, and quality ranking for Web articles.

This two volume set LNCS 7446 and LNCS 7447 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications, DEXA 2012, held in Vienna, Austria, September 3-6, 2012. The 49 revised full papers presented together with 37 short papers and 2 keynote talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 179 submissions. These papers discuss a range of topics including: database query processing, in particular XML queries; labelling of XML documents; computational efficiency, data extraction; personalization, preferences, and ranking; security and privacy; database schema evaluation and evolution; semantic Web; privacy and provenance; data mining; data streaming; distributed systems; searching and query answering; structuring, compression and optimization; failure, fault analysis, and uncertainty; predication, extraction, and annotation; ranking and personalisation; database partitioning and performance measurement; recommendation and prediction systems; business processes; social networking.

This two volume set LNCS 7446 and LNCS 7447 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications, DEXA 2012, held in Vienna, Austria, September 3-6, 2012. The 49 revised full papers presented together with 37 short papers and 2 keynote talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 179 submissions. These papers discuss a range of topics including: database query processing, in particular XML queries; labelling of XML documents; computational efficiency, data extraction; personalization, preferences, and ranking; security and privacy; database schema evaluation and evolution; semantic Web; privacy and provenance; data mining; data streaming; distributed systems; searching and query answering; structuring, compression and optimization; failure, fault analysis, and uncertainty; predication, extraction, and annotation; ranking and personalisation; database partitioning and performance measurement; recommendation and prediction systems; business processes; social networking.

This Festschrift, published in honor of Bernhard Thalheim on the occasion of his 60th birthday presents 20 articles by colleagues from all over the world with whom Bernhard Thalheim had cooperation in various respects; also included is a scientific biography contributed by the volume editors. The 20 contributions reflect the breadth and the depth of the work of Bernhard Thalheim in conceptual modeling and database theory during his scientific career spanning more than 35 years of active research. In particular, ten articles are focusing on topics like database dependency theory, object-oriented databases, triggers, abstract state machines, database and information systems design, web semantics, and business processes.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Semantics in Data and Knowledge Bases, SDKB 2010, held in Bordeaux, France in July 2010. The 6 revised full papers presented together with an introductory survey by the volume editors were carefully reviewed and selected during two rounds of revision and improvement. The papers reflect a variety of approaches to semantics in data and knowledge bases.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 22 International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications, DEXA 2011, held in Toulouse, France, August 29 - September 2, 2011. The 52 revised full papers and 40 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 207 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on XML querying and views; data mining; queries and search; semantic web; information retrieval; business applications; user support; indexing; queries, views and data warehouses; ontologies; physical aspects of databases; Design; distribution; miscellaneous topics.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 22 International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications, DEXA 2011, held in Toulouse, France, August 29 - September 2, 2011. The 52 revised full papers and 40 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 207 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on query processing; database semantics; skyline queries; security and privacy; spatial and temporal data; semantic web search; storage and search; web search; data integration, transactions and optimization; and web applications.

This volume comprises selected papers of the Third International Workshop on Semanticsin Data and KnowledgeBases, which wascollacatedwith EDBT 2008 and was organized in Nantes on March 29, 2008. The ?rst two workshops "- mantics in Databases" took place in Re? z, Czech Republic in 1995 and Dagstuhl, Germany, 2001. The workshops have had post-proceedings of selected papers given at the workshop. We invited the best papers of the workshop to submit a revised version of their paper. These revisions have been reviewed for the- nal proceedings. The proceedings of the ?rst two workshops were published by Springer in the LNCS series, volumes 1358 and 2582.The SDKB 2008 workshop call for papers led to 19 submissions, which were reviewed by 4 reviewers. We selected six of the papers given at the SDKB 2008 workshop. We - ditionally invited four papers that round up the proceedings. Furthermore, we added a survey on the state of the art in the ?eld. The SDKB workshopseries tries to bring together researchersin the areas of data and knowledge bases who work on aspects of semantics. In particular, the workshoppresents originalcontributions demonstrating the use of logic, discrete mathematics, combinatorics, domain theory and other mathematical theories of semantics for database and knowledge bases, computational linguistics and semiotics, and information and knowledge-based systems.

WISE 2008 was held in Auckland, New Zealand, during September 1-3, at The Auckland University ofTechnology City Campus Conference Centre. The aim of this conferencewasto providean internationalforum for researchers, professi- als, and industrial practitioners to share their knowledge in the rapidly growing area of Web technologies, methodologies, and applications. Previous WISE c- ferences wereheld in Hong Kong, China (2000), Kyoto, Japan (2001), Singapore (2002), Rome, Italy (2003), Brisbane, Australia (2004), New York, USA (2005), Wuhan, China (2006) and Nancy, France (2007). The call for papers created considerable interest. Around 110 paper s- missions were received and the international Program Committee selected 31 papers out of the 110 submissions (an acceptance rate of 28. 2%). Of these, 17 papers were chosen for standard presentation and the remaining 14 papers for short presentation. The authors of the accepted papers range across 13 co- tries: Australia, China, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, Poland, Singapore, Spain, Switzerland and the USA. The technical track of the WISE 2008 program o?ered nine paper presentation sessions. The selected - pers covered a wide and important variety of issues in Web information systems engineering such as querying; search; ranking; trust; peer-to-peer networks; - formation ?ltering; information integration; agents and mining. A few selected papers from WISE 2008 will be published in a special issue of the World Wide Web Journal, bySpringer. Inaddition, a $1000prizewasawardedto the authors ofthepaperselectedforthe"YahikoKambayashiBestPaperAward. "Wethank all authors who submitted their papers and the Program Committee members andexternalreviewersfor their excellent work.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling, ER 2007, held in Auckland, New Zealand, in November 2007.

The 37 revised full papers presented together with 3 keynote lectures were carefully reviewed and selected from 167 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on data warehousing and data mining, design methodologies and tools, information and database integration, information modelling concepts and ontologies, integrity constraints, logical foundations of conceptual modelling, patterns and conceptual meta-modelling, requirements elicitation, reuse and reengineering, semi-structured data and XML, as well as Web information systems and XML.

  This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Semantics in Databases, held in Dagstuhl Castle, Germany, in January 2001. The 10 revised full papers presented together with an introduction by the volume editors were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing. Among the aspects of database semantics discussed are semantic constraints, paraconsistency, logic foundations of databases, ER modeling, type hierarchies, null values, consistency enforcement, logic-based pattern languages, and semantic classification of queries. Among the classes of databases dealt with are deductive databases, relational databases, distributed information systems, and tree-structured data.

This volume contains the papers presented at the "Second International S- posium on Foundations of Information and Knowledge Systems" (FoIKS 2002), which was held in Schloss Salzau, Germany from February 20th to 23rd, 2002. FoIKS is a biennial event focusing on theoretical foundations of information and knowledge systems. It aims to bring together researchers working on the theoretical foundations of information and knowledge systems and to attract researchers working in mathematical ?elds such as discrete mathematics, c- binatorics, logics, and ?nite model theory who are interested in applying their theories to research on database and knowledge base theory. FoIKS took up the tradition of the conference series "Mathematical Fundamentals of Database S- tems" (MFDBS) which enabled East-West collaboration in the ?eld of database theory. The ?rst FoIKS symposium was held in Burg, Spreewald (Germany) in 2000. Former MFDBS conferences were held in Dresden (Germany) in 1987, Visegr ad (Hungary) in 1989, and in Rostock (Germany) in 1991. Proceedings of these previous events were published by Springer-Verlag as volumes 305, 364, 495, and 1762 of the LNCS series. In addition the FoIKS symposium is intended to be a forum for intensive d- cussions. For this reason the time slot of long and short contributions is 60 and 30 minutes respectively, followed by 30 and 15 minutes for discussions, respectively. Furthermore, participants are asked in advance to prepare as correspondents to a contribution of another author. There are also special sessions for the pres- tation and discussion of open research problems."

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Symposium on Foundations of Information and Knowledge Systems, FoIKS 2000, held in Burg, Germany, in February 2000.The 14 revised full papers and four short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 45 submissions. Among the topics addressed are logical foundations and semantics of datamodels, dependency theory, integrity and security, temporal aspects, foundations of information systems design including Web-based information services, and query languages and optimization.

Fundamentals of Information Systems contains articles from the 7th International Workshop on Foundations of Models and Languages for Data and Objects (FoMLaDO '98), which was held in Timmel, Germany. These articles capture various aspects of database and information systems theory: identification as a primitive of database models deontic action programs marked nulls in queries topological canonization in spatial databases complexity of search queries complexity of Web queries attribute grammars for structured document queries hybrid multi-level concurrency control efficient navigation in persistent object stores formal semantics of UML reengineering of object bases and integrity dependence . Fundamentals of Information Systems serves as an excellent reference, providing insight into some of the most challenging research issues in the field.

This Festschrift was published in honor of Egon Boerger on the occasion of his 75th birthday. It acknowledges Prof. Boerger's inspiration as a scientist, author, mentor, and community organizer. Dedicated to a pioneer in the fields of logic and computer science, Egon Boerger's research interests are unusual in scope, from programming languages to hardware architectures, software architectures, control systems, workflow and interaction patterns, business processes, web applications, and concurrent systems. The 18 invited contributions in this volume are by leading researchers in the areas of software engineering, programming languages, business information systems, and computer science logic.