Physics of Thin Films is one of the longest running continuing series in thin film science, consisting of twenty volumes since 1963. The series contains quality studies of the properties of various thinfilms materials and systems.
In order to be able to reflect the development of today's science and to cover all modern aspects of thin films, the series, starting with Volume 20, has moved beyond the basic physics of thin films. It now addresses the most important aspects of both inorganic and organic thin films, in both their theoretical as well as technological aspects. Therefore, in order to reflect the modern technology-oriented problems, the title has been slightly modified from Physics of Thin Films to Thin Films.
Key Features
* Discusses the latest research about structure, physics, and infrared photoemissive behavior of heavily doped silicon homojunctions and Ge and GaAs-based alloy junctions
* Reviews the current status of SiGe/Si quantum wells for infrared detection
* Discusses key developments in the growing research on quantum-well infrared photodetectors (QWIPs)
* Reviews Chois development of a family of novel three-terminal, multi-quantum well devices designed to improve high-temperature IR detectivity at long wavelengths
* Describes recent studies aimed at using multi-quantum well structures to achieve higher performance in solar cell devices based on materials systems

After a brief introduction to the topic of business process modeling, the book offers a quick-start into model-based business process engineering. After that, the foundations of the modeling languages used are conveyed. Meaningful examples are in the foreground - each of the underlying formalisms is treated only as far as needed. Next the Horus Method is described in detail. The book defines a sequence of activities which finally leads to the creation of a complete business process model. The Horus Method, incidentally, is not bound to the use of the Horus software tools. It can be used with other tools or, if necessary, be used even without tool support. Important application fields of business process engineering are described, where the spectrum ranges from business process reengineering to the development and implementation of information systems. The book concludes with an outlook on the future of business process engineering and highlights current research activities in the area.

This book is about the role of knowledge in information systems. Knowledge is usually articulated and exchanged through human language(s). In this sense, language can be seen as the most natural vehicle to convey our concepts, whose meanings are usually intermingled, grouped and organized according to shared criteria, from simple perceptions ( every tree has a stem ) and common sense ( unsupported objects fall ) to complex social conventions ( a tax is a fee charged by a government on a product, income, or activity ). But what is natural for a human being turns out to be extremely difficult for machines: machines need to be instilled with knowledge and suitably equipped with logical and statistical algorithms to reason over it. Computers can t represent the external world and communicate their representations as effectively as humans do: ontologies and NLP have been invented to face this problem: in particular, integrating ontologies with (possibly multi-lingual) computational lexical resources is an essential requirement to make human meanings understandable by machines. This book explores the advancements in this integration, from the most recent steps in building the necessary infrastructure, i.e. the Semantic Web, to the different knowledge contents that can be analyzed, encoded and transferred (multimedia, emotions, events, etc.) through it. The work aims at presenting the progress in the field of integrating ontologies and lexicons: together, they constitute the essential technology for adequately represent, elicit and exchange knowledge contents in information systems, web services, text processing and several other domains of application.

This book describes the main objective of EuroWordNet, which is the building of a multilingual database with lexical semantic networks or wordnets for several European languages. Each wordnet in the database represents a language-specific structure due to the unique lexicalization of concepts in languages. The concepts are inter-linked via a separate Inter-Lingual-Index, where equivalent concepts across languages should share the same index item. The flexible multilingual design of the database makes it possible to compare the lexicalizations and semantic structures, revealing answers to fundamental linguistic and philosophical questions which could never be answered before. How consistent are lexical semantic networks across languages, what are the language-specific differences of these networks, is there a language-universal ontology, how much information can be shared across languages? First attempts to answer these questions are given in the form of a set of shared or common Base Concepts that has been derived from the separate wordnets and their classification by a language-neutral top-ontology. These Base Concepts play a fundamental role in several wordnets. Nevertheless, the database may also serve many practical needs with respect to (cross-language) information retrieval, machine translation tools, language generation tools and language learning tools, which are discussed in the final chapter. The book offers an excellent introduction to the EuroWordNet project for scholars in the field and raises many issues that set the directions for further research in semantics and knowledge engineering.

When foreign powers attack civilians, other countries face an impossible dilemma. Two courses of action emerge: either to retaliate against an abusive government on behalf of its victims, or to remain spectators. Either course offers its own perils: the former, lost lives and resources without certainty of restoring peace or preventing worse problems from proliferating; the latter, cold spectatorship that leaves a country at the mercy of corrupt rulers or to revolution. Philosophers Fernando Teson and Bas van der Vossen offer contrasting views of humanitarian intervention, defining it as either war aimed at ending tyranny, or as violence. The authors employ the tools of impartial modern analytic philosophy, particularly just war theory, to substantiate their claims. According to Teson, a humanitarian intervention has the same just cause as a justified revolution: ending tyranny. He analyzes the different kinds of just cause and whether or not an intervener may pursue other justified causes. For Teson, the permissibility of humanitarian intervention is almost exclusively determined by the rules of proportionality. Bas van der Vossen, by contrast, holds that military intervention is morally impermissible in almost all cases. Justified interventions, Van der Vossen argues, must have high ex ante chance of success. Analyzing the history and prospects of intervention shows that they almost never do. Teson and van der Vossen refer to concrete cases, and weigh the consequences of continued or future intervention in Syria, Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Iraq, Lybia and Egypt. By placing two philosophers in dialogue, Debating Humanitarian Intervention is not constrained by a single, unifying solution to the exclusion of all others. Rather, it considers many conceivable actions as judged by analytic philosophy, leaving the reader equipped to make her own, informed judgments.

The status of economic liberties remains a serious lacuna in the theory and practice of human rights. Should a minimally just society protect the freedoms to sell, save, profit and invest? Is being prohibited to run a business a human rights violation? While these liberties enjoy virtually no support from the existing philosophical theories of human rights and little protection by the international human rights law, they are of tremendous importance in the lives of individuals, and particularly the poor. Like most individual liberties, economic liberties increase our ability to lead our own life. When we enjoy them, we can choose the occupational paths that best fit us and, in so doing, define who they are in relation to others. Furthermore, in the absence of good jobs, economic liberties allow us to create an alternative path to subsistence. This is critical for the millions of working poor in developing countries who earn their livelihoods by engaging in independent economic activities. Insecure economic liberties leave them vulnerable to harassment, bribery and other forms of abuse from middlemen and public officials. This book opens a debate about the moral and legal status of economic liberties as human rights. It brings together political and legal theorists working in the domain of human rights and global justice, as well as people engaged in the practice of human rights, to engage in both foundational and applied issues concerning these questions.

The Routledge Language Family series is aimed at undergraduates and postgraduates of linguistics and language, and those with an interest in historical linguistics, linguistic anthropology and language development. According to a widely accepted hypothesis, the Khoesan languages represent the smallest of the four language phyla in Africa, geographically distributed mainly in Botswana and Namibia. Today, only 30 or so Khoesan languages may still exist, with about 300,000 native speakers. In other words, most Khoesan languages were already extinct before a sound scholarly interest in them could begin to develop. Drawing together a distinguished group of international experts, with much of the material taken from data collected by the authors' own field work, this volume presents descriptive, typological, historical-comparative and sociolinguistic material on Khoesan. The Khoesan Languages contains eight sections: an introduction, an overview of genetic relationships, a typological survey and profile of Khoesan, four chapters covering core linguistic areas of Khoesan phonetics and phonology, tonology, morphology and syntax, and a final chapter tackling major issues in Khoesan sociolinguistics, as well as discussions of language contact. Comprehensive and scholarly, yet also lucid in its coverage of a broad range of languages, dialects and sub-groups, this unprecedented and original work represents the current state of Khoesan linguistics.

This book discusses the Party for Freedom (PVV), a political party in the Netherlands, founded and led by Geert Wilders. Attaining between 10 and 18% of the votes, the PVV has become one of the largest parties in the Netherlands and is the only political party worldwide without members. Between 2010 and 2012 the party supported a minority coalition of liberals and christian-democrats in exchange for influence on governmental policy. The PVV can be viewed as the Dutch version of an ideological family of nationalist parties linked by their opposition to immigration and to the political and cultural elites. Within this family, Geert Wilders has played an important role as pioneer of a new master frame, in which Islam is portrayed as the historical arch-enemy of the West. As the main figurehead of European islamophobia, Wilders has inspired political parties and organizations in Europe, North-America, Israel and even Australia. Examining data collected on various aspects of the party (for example, voters, activists, organization and ideology) and employing theoretical insights from sociology, electoral geography and political science, this book analyses this controversial phenomenon and seeks to obtain a clearer picture of the functioning of the PVV. This book will be of interest to students and scholars interested in European politics and current affairs more generally.

This remarkable book has endured as a true masterpiece of mathematical exposition. There are few mathematics books that are still so widely read and continue to have so much to offer-even after more than half a century has passed! The book is overflowing with mathematical ideas, which are always explained clearly and elegantly, and above all, with penetrating insight. It is a joy to read, both for beginners and experienced mathematicians. "Hilbert and Cohn-Vossen" is full of interesting facts, many of which you wish you had known before. It's also likely that you have heard those facts before, but surely wondered where they could be found. The book begins with examples of the simplest curves and surfaces, including thread constructions of certain quadrics and other surfaces. The chapter on regular systems of points leads to the crystallographic groups and the regular polyhedra in R3. In this chapter, they also discuss plane lattices. By considering unit lattices, and throwing in a small amount of number theory when necessary, they effortlessly derive Leibniz's series: ?/4=1?1/3+1/5?1/7+?.... In the section on lattices in three and more dimensions, the authors consider sphere-packing problems, including the famous Kepler problem. One of the most remarkable chapters is "Projective Configurations". In a short introductory section, Hilbert and Cohn-Vossen give perhaps the most concise and lucid description of why a general geometer would care about projective geometry and why such an ostensibly plain setup is truly rich in structure and ideas. Here, we see regular polyhedra again, from a different perspective. One of the high points of the chapter is the discussion of Schlafli's Double-Six, which leads to the description of the 27 lines on the general smooth cubic surface. As is true throughout the book, the magnificent drawings in this chapter immeasurably help the reader. A particularly intriguing section in the chapter on differential geometry is Eleven Properties of the Sphere. Which eleven properties of such a ubiquitous mathematical object caught their discerning eye and why? Many mathematicians are familiar with the plaster models of surfaces found in many mathematics departments. The book includes pictures of some of the models that are found in the Goettingen collection. Furthermore, the mysterious lines that mark these surfaces are finally explained! The chapter on kinematics includes a nice discussion of linkages and the geometry of configurations of points and rods that are connected and, perhaps, constrained in some way. This topic in geometry has become increasingly important in recent times, especially in applications to robotics. This is another example of a simple situation that leads to a rich geometry. It would be hard to overestimate the continuing influence Hilbert-Cohn-Vossen's book has had on mathematicians of this century. It surely belongs in the "pantheon" of great mathematics books.

Libertarians often bill their theory as an alternative to both the traditional Left and Right. The Routledge Handbook of Libertarianism helps readers fully examine this alternative without preaching it to them, exploring the contours of libertarian (sometimes also called classical liberal) thinking on justice, institutions, interpersonal ethics, government, and political economy. The 31 chapters--all written specifically for this volume--are organized into five parts. Part I asks, what should libertarianism learn from other theories of justice, and what should defenders of other theories of justice learn from libertarianism? Part II asks, what are some of the deepest problems facing libertarian theories? Part III asks, what is the right way to think about property rights and the market? Part IV asks, how should we think about the state? Finally, part V asks, how well (or badly) can libertarianism deal with some of the major policy challenges of our day, such as immigration, trade, religion in politics, and paternalism in a free market. Among the Handbook's chapters are those from critics who write about what they believe libertarians get right as well as others from leading libertarian theorists who identify what they think libertarians get wrong. As a whole, the Handbook provides a comprehensive, clear-eyed look at what libertarianism has been and could be, and why it matters.

"Transactional Information Systems" is the long-awaited, comprehensive work from leading scientists in the transaction processing field. Weikum and Vossen begin with a broad look at the role of transactional technology in today's economic and scientific endeavors, then delve into critical issues faced by all practitioners, presenting today's most effective techniques for controlling concurrent access by multiple clients, recovering from system failures, and coordinating distributed transactions.

The authors emphasize formal models that are easily applied across fields, that promise to remain valid as current technologies evolve, and that lend themselves to generalization and extension in the development of new classes of network-centric, functionally rich applications. This book's purpose and achievement is the presentation of the foundations of transactional systems as well as the practical aspects of the field what will help you meet today's challenges.
* Provides the most advanced coverage of the topic available anywhere--along with the database background required for you to make full use of this material.
* Explores transaction processing both generically as a broadly applicable set of information technology practices and specifically as a group of techniques for meeting the goals of your enterprise.
* Contains information essential to developers of Web-based e-Commerce functionality--and a wide range of more "traditional" applications.
* Details the algorithms underlying core transaction processing functionality.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Advances in Computational Collective Intelligence,  ICCCI 2023, held in Budapest, Hungary, during September 27–29, 2023. The 59 full papers included in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 218 submissions. They were organized in topical sections as follows: Collective Intelligence and Collective Decision-Making, Deep Learning Techniques,  Natural Language Processing, Data Minning and Machine learning, Social Networks and Speek Communication, Cybersecurity and Internet of Things, Cooperative Strategies for Decision Making and Optimization, Digital Content Understanding and Apllication for Industry 4.0 and Computational Intelligence in Medical Applications.

Shell scripts are everywhere, especially those written in bash compatible syntax, and it's extremely useful to be able to understand and write them, but they can be complex and obscure. Complexity is the enemy of security, but it's also the enemy of readability and understanding. With this practical book, you'll learn how to decipher old bash code and write new code that's as clear and readable as possible. Your future you will thank you. Authors Carl Albing and JP Vossen show you how to use the power and flexibility of the shell to your advantage. You'll learn how to read and write scripts like an expert, so that you can: Write useful, flexible, and readable bash code...with style Decode bash code such as ${MAKEMELC,,} and ${PATHNAME##*/} Save time and ensure consistency when automating tasks Amaze and impress colleagues with bash idioms Discover how bash idioms can make your code clean and concise

For system administrators, programmers, and end users, shell command or carefully crafted shell script can save you time and effort, or facilitate consistency and repeatability for a variety of common tasks. This cookbook provides more than 300 practical recipes for using bash, the popular Unix shell that enables you to harness and customize the power of any Unix or Linux system. Ideal for new and experienced users alike-including proficient Windows users and sysadmins-this updated second edition helps you solve a wide range of problems. You'll learn ways to handle input/output, file manipulation, program execution, administrative tasks, and many other challenges. Each recipe includes one or more scripting examples and a discussion of why the solution works. You'll find recipes for problems including: Standard output and input, and executing commands Shell variables, shell logic, and arithmetic Intermediate shell tools and advanced scripting Searching for files with find, locate, and slocate Working with dates and times Creating shell scripts for various end-user tasks Working with tasks that require parsing Writing secure shell scripts Configuring and customizing bash

The status of economic liberties remains a serious lacuna in the theory and practice of human rights. Should a minimally just society protect the freedoms to sell, save, profit and invest? Is being prohibited to run a business a human rights violation? While these liberties enjoy virtually no support from the existing philosophical theories of human rights and little protection by the international human rights law, they are of tremendous importance in the lives of individuals, and particularly the poor. Like most individual liberties, economic liberties increase our ability to lead our own life. When we enjoy them, we can choose the occupational paths that best fit us and, in so doing, define who they are in relation to others. Furthermore, in the absence of good jobs, economic liberties allow us to create an alternative path to subsistence. This is critical for the millions of working poor in developing countries who earn their livelihoods by engaging in independent economic activities. Insecure economic liberties leave them vulnerable to harassment, bribery and other forms of abuse from middlemen and public officials. This book opens a debate about the moral and legal status of economic liberties as human rights. It brings together political and legal theorists working in the domain of human rights and global justice, as well as people engaged in the practice of human rights, to engage in both foundational and applied issues concerning these questions.

In order to exchange knowledge, humans need to share a common lexicon of words as well as to access the world models underlying that lexicon. What is a natural process for a human turns out to be an extremely hard task for a machine: computers can't represent knowledge as effectively as humans do, which hampers, for example, meaning disambiguation and communication. Applied ontologies and NLP have been developed to face these challenges. Integrating ontologies with (possibly multilingual) lexical resources is an essential requirement to make human language understandable by machines, and also to enable interoperability and computability across information systems and, ultimately, in the Web. This book explores recent advances in the integration of ontologies and lexical resources, including questions such as building the required infrastructure (e.g., the Semantic Web) and different formalisms, methods and platforms for eliciting, analyzing and encoding knowledge contents (e.g., multimedia, emotions, events, etc.). The contributors look towards next-generation technologies, shifting the focus from the state of the art to the future of Ontologies and Lexical Resources. This work will be of interest to research scientists, graduate students, and professionals in the fields of knowledge engineering, computational linguistics, and semantic technologies.

The Routledge Language Family series is aimed at undergraduates and postgraduates of linguistics and language, and those with an interest in historical linguistics, linguistic anthropology and language development. According to a widely accepted hypothesis, the Khoesan languages represent the smallest of the four language phyla in Africa, geographically distributed mainly in Botswana and Namibia. Today, only 30 or so Khoesan languages may still exist, with about 300,000 native speakers. In other words, most Khoesan languages were already extinct before a sound scholarly interest in them could begin to develop. Drawing together a distinguished group of international experts, with much of the material taken from data collected by the authors' own field work, this volume presents descriptive, typological, historical-comparative and sociolinguistic material on Khoesan. The Khoesan Languages contains eight sections: an introduction, an overview of genetic relationships, a typological survey and profile of Khoesan, four chapters covering core linguistic areas of Khoesan phonetics and phonology, tonology, morphology and syntax, and a final chapter tackling major issues in Khoesan sociolinguistics, as well as discussions of language contact. Comprehensive and scholarly, yet also lucid in its coverage of a broad range of languages, dialects and sub-groups, this unprecedented and original work represents the current state of Khoesan linguistics.

This book describes the main objective of EuroWordNet, which is the building of a multilingual database with lexical semantic networks or wordnets for several European languages. Each wordnet in the database represents a language-specific structure due to the unique lexicalization of concepts in languages. The concepts are inter-linked via a separate Inter-Lingual-Index, where equivalent concepts across languages should share the same index item. The flexible multilingual design of the database makes it possible to compare the lexicalizations and semantic structures, revealing answers to fundamental linguistic and philosophical questions which could never be answered before. How consistent are lexical semantic networks across languages, what are the language-specific differences of these networks, is there a language-universal ontology, how much information can be shared across languages? First attempts to answer these questions are given in the form of a set of shared or common Base Concepts that has been derived from the separate wordnets and their classification by a language-neutral top-ontology. These Base Concepts play a fundamental role in several wordnets. Nevertheless, the database may also serve many practical needs with respect to (cross-language) information retrieval, machine translation tools, language generation tools and language learning tools, which are discussed in the final chapter. The book offers an excellent introduction to the EuroWordNet project for scholars in the field and raises many issues that set the directions for further research in semantics and knowledge engineering.

Welcome to the tenth anniversary of the International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering, WISE 2009. This year the WISE conference continued the tradition that has evolved from the inaugural conference held in 2000 in Hong Kong and since then has made its journey around the world: 2001 Kyoto (Japan), 2002 Singapore, 2003 Rome (Italy), 2004 Brisbane (Australia), 2005 New York (USA), 2006 Wuhan (China), 2007 Nancy (France), and 2008 Auckland (New Zealand). This year we were happy to hold the event in Poznan, a city of 600,000 inhabitants in western Poland. Poznan is the capital of the most affluent province of the country - Wielkopolska - which means "Greater Poland". For more than 1,000 years, Poznan's geographical location has predestined the city to be a significant scientific, cultural and economic center with more than just regional influence. The city is situated on the strategic cross-roads from Paris and Berlin in the west, to Warsaw and Moscow in the east, and from Scandinavia through the Baltic Sea in the north to the Balkans in the south. Poznan is a great research and university center with a dynamic potential. In all, 140,000 students are enrolled in 26 state-run and private institutions of higher education here, among which the Poznan University of Economics with its 12,000 students is one of the biggest. The WISE 2009 Conference provided a forum for engineers and scientists to present their latest findings in Web-related technologies and solutions.

These proceedings contain 25 contributed papers presented at the 13th East- EuropeanConferenceAdvances on Databases and InformationSystems (ADBIS 2009) held September 7-10, 2009, in Riga, Latvia. The Call for Papers attracted 93 submissions from 28 countries. In a rigorous reviewing process the inter- tional Program Committee of 64 members from 29 countries selected these 25 contributions for publication in this volume; in addition, there is the abstract of an invited talk by Matthias Brantner. Furthermore, 18 additional contributions were selected for short presentations and have been published in a separate v- ume of local proceedings by the organizing institution. Topically, the accepted paperscoverawidespectrumofdatabaseandinformationsystemtopicsranging from query processing and optimization via query languages, design methods, data integration, indexing and caching to business processes, data mining, and application oriented topics like XML and data on the Web. The ADBIS 2009conference continued the series of ADBIS conferencesor- nized every year in di?erent countries of Easternand Central Europe, beginning in St. Petersburg (Russia, 1997), Poznan (Poland, 1998), Maribor (Slovenia, 1999), Prague (Czech Republic, as a joint ADBIS-DASFAA conference, 2000), Vilnius(Lithuania,2001), Bratislava(Slovakia,2002), Dresden(Germany,2003), Budapest(Hungary,2004), Tallinn(Estonia,2005), Thessaloniki(Greece,2006), Varna (Bulgaria, 2007), and Pori (Finland, 2008). The conferences are initiated and supervised by an international Steering Committee, which consists of r- resentatives from Armenia, Austria, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Greece, Estonia, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Serbia, S- vakia, Slovenia, and Ukraine, and is chaired by Professor Leonid Kaliniche

It is a great pleasure to share with you the Springer CCIS proceedings of the First World Summit on the Knowledge Society - WSKS 2008 that was organized by the Open Research Society, NGO, http://www.open-knowledge-society.org, and hosted by the American College of Greece, http://www.acg.gr, during September 24-27, 2008, in Athens, Greece. The World Summit on the Knowledge Society Series is an international attempt to promote a dialogue on the main aspects of a knowledge society toward a better world for all based on knowledge and learning. The WSKS Series brings together academics, people from industry, policy makers, politicians, government officers and active citizens to look at the impact of infor- tion technology, and the knowledge-based era it is creating, on key facets of today's world: the state, business, society and culture. Six general pillars provide the constitutional elements of the WSKS series: * Social and Humanistic Computing for the Knowledge Society--Emerging Te- nologies and Systems for the Society and Humanity * Knowledge, Learning, Education, Learning Technologies and E-learning for the Knowledge Society * Information Technologies--Knowledge Management Systems--E-business and Enterprise Information Systems for the Knowledge Society * Culture and Cultural Heritage--Technology for Culture Management--Management of Tourism and Entertainment--Tourism Networks in the Knowledge Society * Government and Democracy for the Knowledge Society * Research and Sustainable Development in the Knowledge Society The summit provides a distinct, unique forum for cross-disciplinary fertilization of research, favoring the dissemination of research that is relevant to international re-