Both the way we look at data, through a DBMS, and the nature of data we ask a DBMS to manage have drastically evolved over the last decade, moving from text to images (and to sound to a lesser extent). Visual representations are used extensively within new user interfaces. Powerful visual approaches are being experimented for data manipulation, including the investigation of three dimensional display techniques. Similarly, sophisticated data visualization techniques are dramatically improving the understanding of the information extracted from a database. On the other hand, more and more applications use images as basic data or to enhance the quality and richness of data manipulation services. Image management has opened a wide area of new research topics in image understanding and analysis. The IFIP 2.6 Working Group on Databases strongly believes that a significant mutual enrichment is possible by confronting ideas, concepts and techniques supporting the work of researcher and practitioners in the two areas of visual interfaces to DBMS and DBMS management of visual data. For this reason, IFIP 2.6 has launched a series of conferences on Visual Database Systems. The first one has been held in Tokyo, 1989. VDB-2 was held in Budapest, 1991. This conference is the third in the series. As the preceding editions, the conference addresses researchers and practitioners active or interested in user interfaces, human-computer communication, knowledge representation and management, image processing and understanding, multimedia database techniques and computer vision.

Searching for Semantics: Data Mining, Reverse Engineering Stefano Spaccapietra Fred M aryanski Swiss Federal Institute of Technology University of Connecticut Lausanne, Switzerland Storrs, CT, USA REVIEW AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS In the last few years, database semantics research has turned sharply from a highly theoretical domain to one with more focus on practical aspects. The DS- 7 Working Conference held in October 1997 in Leysin, Switzerland, demon strated the more pragmatic orientation of the current generation of leading researchers. The papers presented at the meeting emphasized the two major areas: the discovery of semantics and semantic data modeling. The work in the latter category indicates that although object-oriented database management systems have emerged as commercially viable prod ucts, many fundamental modeling issues require further investigation. Today's object-oriented systems provide the capability to describe complex objects and include techniques for mapping from a relational database to objects. However, we must further explore the expression of information regarding the dimensions of time and space. Semantic models possess the richness to describe systems containing spatial and temporal data. The challenge of in corporating these features in a manner that promotes efficient manipulation by the subject specialist still requires extensive development.

The LNCS Journal on Data Semantics is devoted to the presentation of notable work that, in one way or another, addresses research and development on issues related to data semantics. The scope of the journal ranges from theories supporting the formal definition of semantic content to innovative domain-specific applications of semantic knowledge. The journal addresses researchers and advanced practitioners working on the semantic web, interoperability, mobile information services, data warehousing, knowledge representation and reasoning, conceptual database modeling, ontologies, and artificial intelligence. Volume XV results from a rigorous selection among 25 full papers received in response to two calls for contributions issued in 2009 and 2010. In addition, this volume contains a special report on the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative, an event that has been held once a year in the last five years and has attracted considerable attention from the ontology community. This is the last LNCS transactions volume of the Journal on Data Semantics; the next issue will appear as a regular Springer Journal, published quarterly starting from 2012.

From environmental management to land planning and geo-marketing, the number of application domains that may greatly benefit from using data enriched with spatio-temporal features is expanding very rapidly. This book shows that a conceptual design approach for spatio-temporal databases is both feasible and easy to apprehend. While providing a firm basis through extensive discussion of traditional data modeling concepts, the major focus of the book is on modeling spatial and temporal information.

The LNCS Journal on Data Semantics is devoted to the presentation of notable work that, in one way or another, addresses research and development on issues related to data semantics. The scope of the journal ranges from theories supporting the formal definition of semantic content to innovative domain-specific applications of semantic knowledge. The journal addresses researchers and advanced practitioners working on the semantic web, interoperability, mobile information services, data warehousing, knowledge representation and reasoning, conceptual database modeling, ontologies, and artificial intelligence.

Volume XIV results from a rigorous selection among 21 full papers received in response to a call for contributions issued in September 2008.

* Semantic caching * 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 specifically related to semantic issues. Contributions submitted to the journal and dealing with semantics of data will be considered even if they are not from the topics in the list. While the physical appearance of the journal issues is like the books from the well-known Springer LNCS series, the mode of operation is that of a journal. 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 the best papers from major conferences addressing data semantics issues. Special issues, focusing on a specific 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 Editorial Board comprises an Editor-in-Chief (with overall responsibility), a Coeditor-in-Chief, and several members. The Editor-in-Chief has a four-year mandate. Members of the board have a three-year mandate. Mandates are renewable and new members may be elected at any time. We are happy to welcome you to our readership and authorship, and hope we will share this privileged contact for a long time.

The growing emphasis on complexity concerns for ontologies has attracted signi cant interest from both the researchers' and the practitioners' communities in modularization techniques as a way to decrease the complexity of managing huge ontologies.Researchhasproducedmanycomplementaryandcompetingapproaches, mainly with the goal of supportingpractitioners' methodologieswith sound and p- cisely de nedfoundationsand alternatives.Existing prototypessubstantiate research results and experimental evaluations have been performed. Thus, a large body of work is available. This book has been designed to provide the reader with a detailed analysis of where we stand today and which concepts, theories and techniques for knowledge modularization we can con dently rely on. The material for the book has been - lected from research achievements that are mature enough to be considered as a rm and reliable basis on which to inspire further work and to develop solutions in c- crete environments. The content of the book has been organized in three parts. Part I holds a general introductionto theidea andissuescharacterizingmodularization.Thisisfollowedby three chapters that offer an in-depth analysis of properties, criteria and knowledge import techniques for modularization. The last chapter discusses one of the three approaches that implement the modularization idea. The two other approaches are covered in detail in parts II and III.

Papers were invited based on their quality, relevance and significance, and the - ability of extending their results. Extended versions prepared by authors were subject to the traditional two-round scholarly review process, and the authors were required to respond to all concerns expressed by the reviewers before papers were accepted. Eight papers were eventually accepted for publication in this issue. The selection of SWESE best papers eventually resulted in the acceptance of two papers. The first paper "Experiences in the Design of Semantic Services Using Web En- neering Methods and Tools," by Brambilla, Ceri, Celino, Cerizza, Della Valle, Facca, Turati, and Tzviskou, shows how classical software engineering methods (such as formal business process development and automatic code generation) combine with semantic methods and tools (i.e., ontology engineering, semantic service annotation and discovery) to forge a new approach to software development for the Semantic Web. In the paper, the authors present their experience in the participation to the - mantic Web Service Challenge 2006, where the proposed approach achieved very good results in solving the proposed problems. The second paper "Automatically Generated Model Transformations Using Ont- ogy Engineering Space," by Roser and Bauer, presents an approach to using the - mantic technologies to improve cross-organizational modeling by automated gene- tion of model transformations. By automated generation of mappings it offers new possibilities for the integration of domain specific languages and 'legacy' models in a plug&play manner, making it easier for new organizations to join collaborations.

Conceptual modeling has long been recognized as the primary means to enable so- ware development in information systems and data engineering. Conceptual modeling provides languages, methods and tools to understand and represent the application domain; to elicit, conceptualize and formalize system requirements and user needs; to communicate systems designs to all stakeholders; and to formally verify and validate systems design on high levels of abstraction. The International Conference on Conceptual Modeling provides a premiere forum for presenting and discussing current research and applications in which the major emphasis is on conceptual modeling. Topics of interest span the entire spectrum of conceptual modeling including research and practice in areas such as theories of concepts and ontologies underlying conceptual modeling, methods and tools for - veloping and communicating conceptual models, and techniques for transforming conceptual models into effective implementations. The scientific program of ER 2008 featured several activities running in parallel. The core activity was the presentation of the 33 research papers published in this volume, which were selected by a large Program Committee (PC) Co-chaired by Qing Li, Stefano Spaccapietra and Eric Yu. We thank the PC Co-chairs, the PC members and the additional referees for the hard work done, often within a short time. Thanks are also due to Moira Norrie from ETH Zurich, Oscar Pastor from the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia, and Amit Sheth from the Wright State Univ- sity for accepting our invitation to present keynotes."

The LNCS Journal on Data Semantics is devoted to the presentation of notable work that, in one way or another, addresses research and development on issues related to data semantics. Based on the highly visible publication platform Lecture Notes in Computer Science, this journal is widely disseminated and available worldwide.

The scope of the journal ranges from theories supporting the formal definition of semantic content to innovative domain-specific applications of semantic knowledge. The journal addresses researchers and advanced practitioners working on the semantic web, interoperability, mobile information services, data warehousing, knowledge representation and reasoning, conceptual database modeling, ontologies, and artificial intelligence.

The LNCS Journal on Data Semantics is devoted to the presentation of notable work that, in one way or another, addresses research and development on issues related to data semantics. Based on the highly visible publication platform Lecture Notes in Computer Science, this new journal is widely disseminated and available worldwide.

The scope of the journal ranges from theories supporting the formal definition of semantic content to innovative domain-specific applications of semantic knowledge. The journal addresses researchers and advanced practitioners working on the semantic web, interoperability, mobile information services, data warehousing, knowledge representation and reasoning, conceptual database modeling, ontologies, and artificial intelligence.

The LNCS Journal on Data Semantics is devoted to the presentation of notable work that, in one way or another, addresses research and development on issues related to data semantics. The scope of the journal ranges from theories supporting the formal definition of semantic content to innovative domain-specific applications of semantic knowledge.

The LNCS Journal on Data Semantics is devoted to the presentation of notable work that, in one way or another, addresses research and development on issues related to data semantics. Based on the highly visible publication platform Lecture Notes in Computer Science, this new journal is widely disseminated and available worldwide.

The scope of the journal ranges from theories supporting the formal definition of semantic content to innovative domain-specific applications of semantic knowledge. The journal addresses researchers and advanced practitioners working on the semantic web, interoperability, mobile information services, data warehousing, knowledge representation and reasoning, conceptual database modeling, ontologies, and artificial intelligence.

* 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.

From environmental management to land planning and geo-marketing, the number of application domains that may greatly benefit from using data enriched with spatio-temporal features is expanding very rapidly. Unfortunately, development of new spatio-temporal applications is hampered by the lack of conceptual design methods suited to cope with the additional complexity of spatio-temporal data. This complexity is obviously due to the particular semantics of space and time, but also to the need for multiple representations of the same reality to address the diversity of requirements from highly heterogeneous user communities. Conceptual design methods are also needed to facilitate the exchange and reuse of existing data sets, a must in geographical data management due to the high collection costs of the data. Yet, current practice in areas like geographical information systems or moving objects databases does not include conceptual design methods very well, if at all.

This book shows that a conceptual design approach for spatio-temporal databases is both feasible and easy to apprehend. While providing a firm basis through extensive discussion of traditional data modeling concepts, the major focus of the book is on modeling spatial and temporal information. Parent, Spaccapietra and Zimanyi provide a detailed and comprehensive description of an approach that fills the gap between application conceptual requirements and system capabilities, covering both data modeling and data manipulation features. The ideas presented summarize several years of research on the characteristics and description of space, time, and perception. In addition to the authors' own data modeling approach, MADS (Modeling of Application Data with Spatio-temporal features), the book also surveys alternative data models and approaches (from industry and academia) that target support of spatio-temporal modeling.

The reader will acquire intimate knowledge of both the traditional and innovative features that form a consistent data modeling approach. Visual notations and examples are employed extensively to illustrate the use of the various constructs. Therefore, this book is of major importance and interest to advanced professionals, researchers, and graduate or post-graduate students in the areas of spatio-temporal databases and geographical information systems.

"For anyone thinking of doing research in this field, or who is developing a system based on spatio-temporal data, this text is essential reading." (Mike Worboys, U Maine, Orono, ME, USA)

"The high-level semantic model presented and validated in this book provides essential guidance to researchers and implementers when improving the capabilities of data systems to serve the actual needs of applications and their users in the temporal and spatial domains that are so prevalent today." (Gio Wiederhold, Stanford U, CA, USA)"

The LNCS Journal on Data Semantics is devoted to the presentation of notable work that addresses research and development on issues related to data semantics. Based on the highly visible publication platform Lecture Notes in Computer Science, this new journal is widely disseminated and available worldwide. The scope of the journal ranges from theories supporting the formal definition of semantic content to innovative domain-specific applications of semantic knowledge.

* Semantics in data visualization * Semantic services for mobile users * Supporting tools * Applications of semantic-driven approaches These topics are to be understood as specifically 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 appearance of the journal issues is like the books from the we- known Springer LNCS series, the mode of operation is that of a journal. 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 the best papers from major conferences addressing data semantics issues. Special issues, focusing on a specific 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.

- semantic caching - 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 appearance of the journal issues looks like the books from the well-known Springer LNCS series, the mode of operation is that of a journal. 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, focusing 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 LNCS Journal on Data Semantics is devoted to the presentation of notable work that, in one way or another, addresses research and development on issues related to data semantics. Based on the highly visible publication platform Lecture Notes in Computer Science, this new journal is widely disseminated and available worldwide.

The scope of the journal ranges from theories supporting the formal definition of semantic content to innovative domain-specific applications of semantic knowledge. The journal addresses researchers and advanced practitioners working on the semantic web, interoperability, mobile information services, data warehousing, knowledge representation and reasoning, conceptual database modeling, ontologies, and artificial intelligence.

The explosion in data exchange fostered by the success of the Web has restated semantics as a kernel issue in the development of services providing data and - formationtousersandapplicationsworldwide.Thisnewlydesignatedconference serieson"SemanticsfortheNetworkedWorld"uni?esintoasingleframework the previous series on "Database Semantics" and "Visual Database Systems" that the IFIP WG 2.6 has been o?ering since 1985. Whereas the intent of the conferenceseriesistoexploreinterestingresearchissuesrelatedtosemantics,the themeforthe2004editionis"SemanticsforGridDatabases".Gridcomputing,a new ?eld concentrating on "?exible, secure, coordinated resource sharing among dynamic collections of individuals, institutions, and resources (also referred to as virtual organizations)", has gathered momentum in the context of providing shared infrastructures for large-scale scienti?c computations and data analysis. Similarly, P2P computing has attracted substantial attention. Currently, attention is devoted to the provision of middleware services to makecomputationalresourcesinteroperableatthetechnicallevelandtoincrease the e?ciency of use of physical resources. However, as Grid and P2P computing infrastructures are being increasingly adopted, they are likely to have typical problems of information overload that manifest themselves in any large-scale infrastructure for information and application sharing (e.g., the WWW). The need for resource discovery, application and service interoperability, integration and composition manifest themselves in these infrastructures. The ability to interoperate at the semantic level will largely determine the continued success and utilization of these infrastructures.

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

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Conceptual Modeling, ER 2002, held in Tampere, Finland in October 2002.The 30 revised full papers presented with abstracts of various invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from close to 130 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on semantics and meta-models, principles of ontology, web environments, theory and methods, methods and tools, applications for practice, applying ontology in conceptual modeling, applying ontology in coneptual modeling, systems and data integration, quality assessment, and XML and object systems.

Searching for Semantics: Data Mining, Reverse Engineering Stefano Spaccapietra Fred M aryanski Swiss Federal Institute of Technology University of Connecticut Lausanne, Switzerland Storrs, CT, USA REVIEW AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS In the last few years, database semantics research has turned sharply from a highly theoretical domain to one with more focus on practical aspects. The DS- 7 Working Conference held in October 1997 in Leysin, Switzerland, demon strated the more pragmatic orientation of the current generation of leading researchers. The papers presented at the meeting emphasized the two major areas: the discovery of semantics and semantic data modeling. The work in the latter category indicates that although object-oriented database management systems have emerged as commercially viable prod ucts, many fundamental modeling issues require further investigation. Today's object-oriented systems provide the capability to describe complex objects and include techniques for mapping from a relational database to objects. However, we must further explore the expression of information regarding the dimensions of time and space. Semantic models possess the richness to describe systems containing spatial and temporal data. The challenge of in corporating these features in a manner that promotes efficient manipulation by the subject specialist still requires extensive development."

Both the way we look at data, through a DBMS, and the nature of data we ask a DBMS to manage have drastically evolved over the last decade, moving from text to images (and to sound to a lesser extent). Visual representations are used extensively within new user interfaces. Powerful visual approaches are being experimented for data manipulation, including the investigation of three dimensional display techniques. Similarly, sophisticated data visualization techniques are dramatically improving the understanding of the information extracted from a database. On the other hand, more and more applications use images as basic data or to enhance the quality and richness of data manipulation services. Image management has opened a wide area of new research topics in image understanding and analysis. The IFIP 2.6 Working Group on Databases strongly believes that a significant mutual enrichment is possible by confronting ideas, concepts and techniques supporting the work of researcher and practitioners in the two areas of visual interfaces to DBMS and DBMS management of visual data. For this reason, IFIP 2.6 has launched a series of conferences on Visual Database Systems. The first one has been held in Tokyo, 1989. VDB-2 was held in Budapest, 1991. This conference is the third in the series. As the preceding editions, the conference addresses researchers and practitioners active or interested in user interfaces, human-computer communication, knowledge representation and management, image processing and understanding, multimedia database techniques and computer vision.

The LNCS Journal on Data Semantics is devoted to the presentation of notable work that, in one way or another, addresses research and development on issues related to data semantics. The scope of the journal ranges from theories supporting the formal definition of semantic content to innovative domain-specific applications of semantic knowledge. The journal addresses researchers and advanced practitioners working on the semantic web, interoperability, mobile information services, data warehousing, knowledge representation and reasoning, conceptual database modeling, ontologies, and artificial intelligence.

Volume XIII constitutes a special issue on semantic data warehouses. The papers in this volume address several topics within this relatively new domain, providing different insights into the multiple benefits that can be gained by envisioning data warehouses from a semantic perspective. These papers broach many new ideas to be addressed in future work.