Helene Bestougeff, Universite de Marne Ia Vallee, France Jacques-Emile Dubois, Universite Paris VII-Denis Diderot, France Bhavani Thuraisingham, MITRE Corporation, USA The last fifty years promoted the conceptual trio: Knowledge, Information and Data (KID) to the center of our present scientific technological and human activities. The intrusion of the Internet drastically modified the historical cycles of communication between authors, providers and users. Today, information is often the result of the interaction between data and the knowledge based on their comprehension, interpretation and prediction. Nowadays important goals involve the exchange of heterogeneous information, as many real life and even specific scientific and technological problems are all interdisciplinary by nature. For a specific project, this signifies extracting information, data and even knowledge from many different sources that must be addressed by interoperable programs. Another important challenge is that of corporations collaborating with each other and forming coalitions and partnerships. One development towards achieving this challenge is organizational hubs. This concept is new and still evolving. Much like an airport hub serving air traffic needs, organizational hubs are central platforms that provide information and collaboration specific to a group of users' needs. Now companies are creating hubs particular to certain types of industries. The users of hubs are seen as communities for which all related information is directly available without further searching efforts and often with value-added services.

Concurrent Engineering (CE) is a systematic approach to the integrated and concurrent design of products and related processes, which offers considerable potential for increasing efficiency and effectiveness by considering all the elements of a building or structure over its life cycle, and including issues of quality, cost, schedule, and user requirements. This book presents latest research on the implementation of Concurrent Engineering in construction projects.

This book constitutes the joint refereed proceedings of seven international workshops held as part of OTM 2004 in Agia Napa, Cyprus in October 2004. The 73 revised papers presented together with 31 abstracts of posters from the OTM main conferences were carefully reviewed and selected from more than 150 submissions. In accordance with the 7 workshops, the papers are organized in topical sections on grid computing and its applications to data analysis; Java technologies for real-time and embedded systems; modeling inter-organizational systems; regulatory ontologies; ontologies, semantics and e-learning; PhD symposium; and interoperability.

A special mention for 2004 is in order for the new Doctoral Symposium Workshop where three young postdoc researchers organized an original setup and formula to bring PhD students together and allow them to submit their research proposals for selection. A limited number of the submissions and their approaches were independently evaluated by a panel of senior experts at the conference, and presented by the students in front of a wider audience. These students also got free access to all other parts of the OTM program, and only paid a heavily discounted fee for the Doctoral Symposium itself. (In fact their attendance was largely sponsored by the other participants!) If evaluated as successful, it is the intention of the General Chairs to expand this model in future editions of the OTM conferences and so draw in an audience of young researchers to the OnTheMove forum. All three main conferences and the associated workshops share the d- tributed aspects of modern computing systems, and the resulting applicati- pull created by the Internet and the so-called Semantic Web. For DOA 2004, the primary emphasis stayed on the distributed object infrastructure; for ODBASE 2004, it was the knowledge bases and methods required for enabling the use of formalsemantics;andforCoopIS2004themaintopicwastheinteractionofsuch technologies and methods with management issues, such as occurs in networked organizations. These subject areas naturally overlap and many submissions in factalsotreatenvisagedmutualimpactsamongthem.

Advanced Techniques in Computing Sciences and Software Engineering includes a set of rigorously reviewed world-class manuscripts addressing and detailing state-of-the-art research projects in the areas of Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, and Systems Engineering and Sciences. Advanced Techniques in Computing Sciences and Software Engineering includes selected papers form the conference proceedings of the International Conference on Systems, Computing Sciences and Software Engineering (SCSS 2008) which was part of the International Joint Conferences on Computer, Information and Systems Sciences and Engineering (CISSE 2008).

This is the first book to provide an in-depth coverage of all the developments, issues and challenges in secure databases and applications. It provides directions for data and application security, including securing emerging applications such as bioinformatics, stream information processing and peer-to-peer computing. Divided into eight sections,

The extensive use of the web by patients and laymen for health information, challenges us to build information services that are easily accessible and trustworthy. The evolution towards a semantic web is addressed and papers covering all the fields of biomedical informatics are also included. [Ed.].

Compiles top research from the world's leading experts on many topics related to electronic commerce. Covers topics including mobile commerce, virtual enterprises, business-to-business applications, Web services, and enterprise methodologies.