This volume contains the proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications (DASFAA '97). DASFAA '97 focused on advanced database technologies and their applications. The 55 papers in this volume cover a wide range of areas in the field of database systems and applications ? including the rapidly emerging areas of the Internet, multimedia, and document database systems ? and should be of great interest to all database system researchers and developers, and practitioners.

This volume contains the proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications (DASFAA '97). DASFAA '97 focused on advanced database technologies and their applications. The 55 papers in this volume cover a wide range of areas in the field of database systems and applications - including the rapidly emerging areas of the Internet, multimedia, and document database systems - and should be of great interest to all database system researchers and developers, and practitioners.

The database field has experienced a rapid and incessant growth since the development of relational databases. The progress in database systems and applications has produced a diverse landscape of specialized technology areas that have often become the exclusive domain of research specialists. Examples include active databases, temporal databases, object-oriented databases, deductive databases, imprecise reasoning and queries, and multimedia information systems. This book provides a systematic introduction to and an in-depth treatment of these advanced database areas. It supplies practitioners and researchers with authoritative coverage of recent technological advances that are shaping the future of commercial database systems and intelligent information systems. Advanced Database Systems was written by a team of six leading specialists who have made significant contributions to the development of the technology areas covered in the book. Benefiting from the authors' long experience teaching graduate and professional courses, this book is designed to provide a gradual introduction to advanced research topics and includes many examples and exercises to support its use for individual study, desk reference, and graduate classroom teaching.

This Switzerland-Japan Joint Seminar on Multimedia and Databases was held to achieve at least three goals. First, it enabled us to present and discuss our recent research results and exchange our ideas for further promotion of science and technology. The second goal was to establish a friendly relationship between the Swiss and the Japanese. The last, but not least, aim was to disseminate information about our plans by publishing the proceedings of this seminar. We thought that publishing the outcome of the seminar would be essential in order not to store the treasure — the seminar results — secretly.

Proceedings of the NATO Advanced Study Institute on Workflow Management Systems (WFMS), held in Istanbul, Turkey, August 12 - 21, 1997

With the rapid growth of computer and communication technologies, the creation, modification and distribution of digital multimedia information have become easier than ever. Such multimedia information includes still images, video, audio, texts and artifacts in virtual space. The efficient storage of valuable information and rapid access to it is crucial to all modern organizations.This proceedings volume consists of papers by researchers and academicians which explore the various aspects of the digital media information base. A special emphasis is placed on new database system technologies.

The papers published here highlight the contributions of leading researchers in the field who are working with object-oriented technology, theory and practice. Among the topics to be covered are: object-relational data technology; distributed object computing; patterns and frameworks; concepts and methodologies; multimedia systems; object-0riented metrics; object reuse; object ontologies; business process re-design; knowledge management; object database management systems; and interoperability issues. Areas of significant interest to industry, especially in providing innovative directions for the development of next generation systems, are also covered.

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.

Fundamentals of Information Systems contains articles from the 7th International Workshop on Foundations of Models and Languages for Data and Objects (FoMLaDO '98), which was held in Timmel, Germany. These articles capture various aspects of database and information systems theory: identification as a primitive of database models deontic action programs marked nulls in queries topological canonization in spatial databases complexity of search queries complexity of Web queries attribute grammars for structured document queries hybrid multi-level concurrency control efficient navigation in persistent object stores formal semantics of UML reengineering of object bases and integrity dependence . Fundamentals of Information Systems serves as an excellent reference, providing insight into some of the most challenging research issues in the field.