Recent years have seen an explosive growth in the use of new database applications such as CAD/CAM systems, spatial information systems, and multimedia information systems. The needs of these applications are far more complex than traditional business applications. They call for support of objects with complex data types, such as images and spatial objects, and for support of objects with wildly varying numbers of index terms, such as documents. Traditional indexing techniques such as the B-tree and its variants do not efficiently support these applications, and so new indexing mechanisms have been developed. As a result of the demand for database support for new applications, there has been a proliferation of new indexing techniques. The need for a book addressing indexing problems in advanced applications is evident. For practitioners and database and application developers, this book explains best practice, guiding the selection of appropriate indexes for each application. For researchers, this book provides a foundation for the development of new and more robust indexes. For newcomers, this book is an overview of the wide range of advanced indexing techniques. Indexing Techniques for Advanced Database Systems is suitable as a secondary text for a graduate level course on indexing techniques, and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in industry.

In our increasingly mobile world the ability to access information on demand at any time and place can satisfy people's information needs as well as confer on them a competitive advantage. The emergence of battery-operated, low-cost and portable computers such as palmtops and PDAs, coupled with the availability and exploitation of wireless networks, have made possible the potential for ubiquitous computing. Through the wireless networks, portable equipments will become an integrated part of existing distributed computing environments, and mobile users can have access to data stored at information servers located at the static portion of the network even while they are on the move. Traditionally, information is retrieved following a request-response model. However, this model is no longer adequate in a wireless computing environment. First, the wireless channel is unreliable and the bandwidth is low compared to the wired counterpart. Second, the environment is essentially asymmetric with a large number of mobile users accessing a small number of servers. Third, battery-operated portable devices can typically operate only for a short time because of the short battery lifespan. Thus, clients are expected to be disconnected most of the time. To overcome these limitations, there has been a proliferation of research efforts on designing data delivery mechanisms to support wireless computing more effectively. Data Dissemination in Wireless Computing Environments focuses on such mechanisms. The purpose is to provide a thorough and comprehensive review of recent advances on energy-efficient data delivery protocols, efficient wireless channel bandwidth utilization, reliable broadcasting and cache invalidation strategies for clients with long disconnection time. Besides surveying existing methods, this book also compares and evaluates some of the more promising schemes.

Recent years have seen an explosive growth in the use of new database applications such as CAD/CAM systems, spatial information systems, and multimedia information systems. The needs of these applications are far more complex than traditional business applications. They call for support of objects with complex data types, such as images and spatial objects, and for support of objects with wildly varying numbers of index terms, such as documents. Traditional indexing techniques such as the B-tree and its variants do not efficiently support these applications, and so new indexing mechanisms have been developed. As a result of the demand for database support for new applications, there has been a proliferation of new indexing techniques. The need for a book addressing indexing problems in advanced applications is evident. For practitioners and database and application developers, this book explains best practice, guiding the selection of appropriate indexes for each application. For researchers, this book provides a foundation for the development of new and more robust indexes. For newcomers, this book is an overview of the wide range of advanced indexing techniques. Indexing Techniques for Advanced Database Systems is suitable as a secondary text for a graduate level course on indexing techniques, and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in industry.

In our increasingly mobile world the ability to access information on demand at any time and place can satisfy people's information needs as well as confer on them a competitive advantage. The emergence of battery-operated, low-cost and portable computers such as palmtops and PDAs, coupled with the availability and exploitation of wireless networks, have made possible the potential for ubiquitous computing. Through the wireless networks, portable equipments will become an integrated part of existing distributed computing environments, and mobile users can have access to data stored at information servers located at the static portion of the network even while they are on the move. Traditionally, information is retrieved following a request-response model. However, this model is no longer adequate in a wireless computing environment. First, the wireless channel is unreliable and the bandwidth is low compared to the wired counterpart. Second, the environment is essentially asymmetric with a large number of mobile users accessing a small number of servers. Third, battery-operated portable devices can typically operate only for a short time because of the short battery lifespan. Thus, clients are expected to be disconnected most of the time. To overcome these limitations, there has been a proliferation of research efforts on designing data delivery mechanisms to support wireless computing more effectively. Data Dissemination in Wireless Computing Environments focuses on such mechanisms. The purpose is to provide a thorough and comprehensive review of recent advances on energy-efficient data delivery protocols, efficient wireless channel bandwidth utilization, reliable broadcasting and cache invalidation strategies for clients with long disconnection time. Besides surveying existing methods, this book also compares and evaluates some of the more promising schemes.

In data publishing, the owner delegates the role of satisfying user queries to a third-party publisher. As the servers of the publisher may be untrusted or susceptible to attacks, we cannot assume that they would always process queries correctly, hence there is a need for users to authenticate their query answers. This book introduces various notions that the research community has studied for defining the correctness of a query answer. In particular, it is important to guarantee the completeness, authenticity and minimality of the answer, as well as its freshness. We present authentication mechanisms for a wide variety of queries in the context of relational and spatial databases, text retrieval, and data streams. We also explain the cryptographic protocols from which the authentication mechanisms derive their security properties. Table of Contents: Introduction / Cryptography Foundation / Relational Queries / Spatial Queries / Text Search Queries / Data Streams / Conclusion

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications, DASFAA 2006, held in Singapore in April 2006. 46 revised full papers and 16 revised short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 188 submissions. Topics include sensor networks, subsequence matching and repeating patterns, spatial-temporal databases, data mining, XML compression and indexing, xpath query evaluation, uncertainty and streams, peer-to-peer and distributed networks and more.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Mobile Data Management, MDM 2001, held in Hong Kong, China in January 2001. The 18 revised full papers and five industrial papers presented together with eight posters were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on data management architectures, content delivery, data broadcasting, caching and hoarding, coping with movement, and network and systems issues.

Buddhist Revitalization and Chinese Religions in Malaysia tells the story of how a minority community comes to grips with the challenges of modernity, history, globalization, and cultural assertion in an ever-changing Malaysia. It captures the religious connection, transformation, and tension within a complex traditional belief system in a multi-religious society. In particular, the book revolves around a discussion on the religious revitalization of Chinese Buddhism in modern Malaysia. This Buddhist revitalization movement is intertwined with various forces, such as colonialism, religious transnationalism, and global capitalism. Reformist Buddhists have helped to remake Malaysia's urban-dwelling Chinese community and have provided an exit option in the Malay and Muslim majority nation state. As Malaysia modernizes, there have been increasing efforts by certain segments of the country's ethnic Chinese Buddhist population to separate Buddhism from popular Chinese religions. Nevertheless, these reformist groups face counterforces from traditional Chinese religionists within the context of the cultural complexity of the Chinese belief system.