Modern computing management systems and application programs are often de signed as open systems. In an open environment, the users' application programs serving similar purposes, though possibly implemented using different hardware or software tech nologies, can interact easily and properly with one other. But, it is a big challenge in research and development to provide the means for integrating these technologies and reengineering the new or existing management systems so as to make all of the relevant components interoperable. In case of databases, because of the variety in data models and theory, the interoper ability and reengineering issues become even more complex and crucial, especially for companies heavily involved in data management. With the rapid advances in networking and database modeling technology, old issues may have to be reinvestigated and new issues come up constantly. It is our hope that this year's workshop, the sixth in a series of annual events, can provide a timely forum for database researchers and practitioners to share their recent experience and results in various aspects of this fast -developing field. This series of workshops has been organized by the Hong Kong Computer Society and financially supported by many local industrial and business companies. This year, the Cooperative Research Centre for Open Systems Technology, located in the Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong, has joined the organization team and the list of financial sponsors.

This volume constitutes the proceedings of the 13th International Conference on the Entity-Relationship Approach, ER '94, held in Manchester, UK in December 1994. The ER '94 book is devoted to business modelling and re-engineering and provides a balanced view between research and practical experience. The 34 full revised papers presented are organized in sections on business process modelling, enterprise modelling, systems evolution, modelling integrity constraints, object-oriented databases, active databases, CASE, reverse engineering, information system modelling, schema coordination, and re-engineering.

Presents research investigating the notion that information communication technologies (ICTs) have the potential to improve the lives of people and contribute to enhancing social conditions in developing countries through such concepts as the Knowledge Society, open education, and e-governance.

Taking a very practical approach, the author describes in detail database conversion techniques, reverse engineering, forward engineering and re-engineering methodologies for information systems, offering a systematic software engineering approach for reusing existing database systems built with “old” technology. He demonstrates how the existing systems can be transformed into the new technologies with the preservation of semantic constraints and without loss of information. In this third edition, with a new chapter on Data Normalization the author shows once the databases have been converted, how to integrate them for consolidating information, and how to normalize them so that they are efficient and user friendly. Many examples, illustrations and case studies together with questions and answers ensure that the methodology is easy to follow. Ideal as a textbook for students studying information systems theories, Information Systems Reengineering Integration and Normalization will also be a valuable management reference book for Information Technology Practitioners. Additional material is available on www.extramaterials/978-3-319-12294-6

The proliferation of databases within organizations have made it imperative to allow effective sharing of information from these disparate database systems. In addition, it is desirable that the individual systems must maintain a certain degree of autonomy over their data in order to continue to provide for their existing applications and to support controlled access to their information. Thus it becomes necessary to develop new techniques and build new functionality to interoperate these autonomous database systems and to integrate them into an overall information system. Research into interoperable database systems has advanced substantially over recent years in response to this need.The papers presented in this volume cover a wide spectrum of both theoretical and pragmatic issues related to the semantics of interoperable database systems. Topics covered include techniques to support the translation between database schema and between database languages; object oriented frameworks for supporting interoperability of heterogeneous databases, knowledge base integration and techniques for overcoming schematic discrepancies in interoperable databases. In addition, there are papers addressing issues of security transaction processing, data modelling and object identification in interoperable database systems. It is hoped the publication will represent a valuable collective contribution to research and development in the field for database researchers, implementors, designers, application builders and users alike.

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.

th 2002 DEXA, the 13 International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications was held on September 2–6, 2002, at the Université Aix–Marseille II, France. The quickly growing field of information systems required the establishment of more specialized discussion platforms (the DaWaK conference, EC-Web conference, eGOV conference and DEXA workshops), and there were held in parallel with DEXA, also in Aix-en-Provence. The resulting book was prepared with great effort. Starting with the preparation of submitted papers, the papers went through the reviewing process. The accepted papers were revised to final versions by their authors and arranged to the conference program. This year 241 papers were submitted and our thanks go to all who have contributed. The program committee and the supporting reviewers produced altogether about 730 referee reports, on average three reports per paper, and selected 89 papers for presentation. The papers presented here encompass the extensive domain of databases; together with the other conferences and workshops of the DEXA event cluster a vast part of applied computer science was covered. In this way DEXA has blazed the trail. At this point we would like to acknowledge to all institutions which actively supported this conference and made it possible. These are: • IUT (Université Aix – Marseille II), • FAW, • DEXA Association, • the Austrian Computer Society, • and Microsoft Research

Database technology is an important subject in Computer Science. Every large company and nation needs a database to store information. The technology has evolved from file systems in the 60’s, to Hierarchical and Network databases in the 70’s, to relational databases in the 80’s, object-oriented databases in the 90’s, and to XML documents and NoSQL today. As a result, there is a need to reengineer and update old databases into new databases. This book presents solutions for this task. In this fourth edition, Chapter 9 - Heterogeneous Database Connectivity (HDBC) offers a database gateway platform for companies to communicate with each other not only with their data, but also via their database. The ability of sharing a database can contribute to the applications of Big Data and surveys for decision support systems. The HDBC gateway solution collects input from the database, transfers the data into its middleware storage, converts it into a common data format such as XML documents, and then distributes them to the users. HDBC transforms the common data into the target database to meet the user’s requirements, acting like a voltage transformer hub. The voltage transformer converts the voltage to a voltage required by the users. Similarly, HDBC transforms the database to the target database required by the users. This book covers reengineering for data conversion, integration for combining databases and merging databases and expert system rules, normalization for eliminating duplicate data from the database, and above all, HDBC connects all legacy databases to one target database for the users. The authors provide a forum for readers to ask questions and the answers are given by the authors and the other readers on the Internet.