This book consists of the refereed proceedings of the 15th British National Conference on Databases, BNCOD 15, held in London, in July 1997.
The 12 revised full papers presented were selected from more than 30 submissions. Also included are 10 poster presentations and the invited lecture on The Role of Intelligent Software Agents in Advanced Information Systems by Larry Kerschberg. The papers are organized in topical sections on transaction processing, optimization, object-orientation and the Internet, and database integration.

This book constitutes the refereed conference proceedings of the 31st British International Conference on Databases, BICOD 2017 - formerly known as BNCOD (British National Conference on Databases) - held in London, UK, in July 2017. The 17 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers cover a wide range of topics such as data cleansing, data integration, data wrangling, data mining and knowledge discovery, graph data and knowledge graphs, intelligent data analysis, approximate and flexible querying, data provenance and ontology-based data access. They are organized in the following topical sections: data wrangling and data integration; data analysis and data mining; graph data querying and analysis; multidimensional data and data quality; and distributed and multimedia data management.

It is the near future. A scientist develops a vaccination for the common cold using nanobots. All goes well until a solar storm causes the nanobots to mutate and turn the host persons into zombies. These are zombies with a difference, and other agencies are at work trying to develop the technology to restore the zombies back to normality. As civilisation begins to fall apart the race is on to find a cure before it is too late. This book and it's characters are a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is a coincidence.

Earth..... it is sometime in the future. The planet is ravaged by war, disease, over-population, civil unrest, and a host of other problems. The one-world government is riven with corruption and dealing with problems it cannot solve. The discovery of a new planet changes the situation, but there is conflict over who should be allowed to live there; the criminals of the world, or just non-criminals and the disease-free, hoping to start a new life. A criminal gang of outcasts escape from a brutal European prison and form a strange alliance with a powerful politician, each with their own reasons in mind. Together they battle against sinister forces and deadly alien creatures while civilisation itself begins to disintegrate around them. A further complication arises when explorers on the newly-discovered planet encounter the indigenous peoples, who have their own troubles to deal with. Good must battle evil and win if there is to be a future for either world. This is an apocalyptic thrill-ride where the forces of good and evil battle it out for the future of humanity, and nothing is as it seems. Gripping from start to finish and full of surprises and humor, you will love this book.

In order to democratise governance at the global level, it is imperative to ensure that the voice of ordinary citizens, especially the most excluded, are heard and acted upon. What forms of direct citizen engagement in the arenas, platforms and mechanisms of global governance can promote this? Which of these forms and processes can be institutionalised? What mechanisms of democratic accountability can be enabled to make representative forms of global governance institutions accountable to the citizens of their own countries? Global Governance, Civil Society and Participatory Democracy: A View from Below answers these questions through the experiences of FIM Forum for Democratic Global Governance in democratising certain arenas and spaces of global governance. Such arenas are not only the powerful and global multilateral organisations of the UN system; they include supra-regional inter-governmental organisations such as the Commonwealth, the OIF, the OIC, as well as the G8, G20 and BRICS. FIM has facilitated connections and relationships within such key organisations of the multilateral sphere. By building these connections, FIM has actualised the exchange between local lived realities and the high level decisions that affect global governance. The lessons of FIM's engagement in the processes, challenges and outcomes of building democracy from below are relevant for civil society actors and policy makers alike. The book is a must read for all those engaged in facilitating, scaling-up and strengthening the mechanisms of participatory democracy in order to create global citizens who become agents of change for a better world.