Uncertain data is inherent in many important applications, such as environmental surveillance, market analysis, and quantitative economics research. Due to the importance of those applications and rapidly increasing amounts of uncertain data collected and accumulated, analyzing large collections of uncertain data has become an important task. Ranking queries (also known as top-k queries) are often natural and useful in analyzing uncertain data. Ranking Queries on Uncertain Data discusses the motivations/applications, challenging problems, the fundamental principles, and the evaluation algorithms of ranking queries on uncertain data. Theoretical and algorithmic results of ranking queries on uncertain data are presented in the last section of this book. Ranking Queries on Uncertain Data is the first book to systematically discuss the problem of ranking queries on uncertain data.

Ranking queries are widely used in data exploration, data analysis and decision making scenarios. While most of the currently proposed ranking techniques focus on deterministic data, several emerging applications involve data that are imprecise or uncertain. Ranking uncertain data raises new challenges in query semantics and processing, making conventional methods inapplicable. Furthermore, the interplay between ranking and uncertainty models introduces new dimensions for ordering query results that do not exist in the traditional settings. This lecture describes new formulations and processing techniques for ranking queries on uncertain data. The formulations are based on marriage of traditional ranking semantics with possible worlds semantics under widely-adopted uncertainty models. In particular, we focus on discussing the impact of tuple-level and attribute-level uncertainty on the semantics and processing techniques of ranking queries. Under the tuple-level uncertainty model, we describe new processing techniques leveraging the capabilities of relational database systems to recognize and handle data uncertainty in score-based ranking. Under the attribute-level uncertainty model, we describe new probabilistic ranking models and a set of query evaluation algorithms, including sampling-based techniques. We also discuss supporting rank join queries on uncertain data, and we show how to extend current rank join methods to handle uncertainty in scoring attributes. Table of Contents: Introduction / Uncertainty Models / Query Semantics / Methodologies / Uncertain Rank Join / Conclusion

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed conference proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Rough Sets, Fuzzy Sets, Data Mining and Granular Computing, RSFDGrC 2013, held in Halifax, Canada in October 2013 as one of the co-located conference of the 2013 Joint Rough Set Symposium, JRS 2013. The 69 papers (including 44 regular and 25 short papers) included in the JRS proceedings (LNCS 8170 and LNCS 8171) were carefully reviewed and selected from 106 submissions. The papers in this volume cover topics such as inconsistency, incompleteness, non-determinism; fuzzy and rough hybridization; granular computing and covering-based rough sets; soft clustering; image and medical data analysis.

Managing and Mining Uncertain Data, a survey with chapters by a variety of well known researchers in the data mining field, presents the most recent models, algorithms, and applications in the uncertain data mining field in a structured and concise way. This book is organized to make it more accessible to applications-driven practitioners for solving real problems. Also, given the lack of structurally organized information on this topic, Managing and Mining Uncertain Data provides insights which are not easily accessible elsewhere. Managing and Mining Uncertain Data is designed for a professional audience composed of researchers and practitioners in industry. This book is also suitable as a reference book for advanced-level students in computer science and engineering, as well as the ACM, IEEE, SIAM, INFORMS and AAAI Society groups.

The LNCS journal Transactions on Large-Scale Data- and Knowledge-Centered Systems focuses on data management, knowledge discovery, and knowledge processing, which are core and hot topics in computer science. Since the 1990s, the Internet has become the main driving force behind application development in all domains. An increase in the demand for resource sharing (e.g., computing resources, services, metadata, data sources) across different sites connected through networks has led to an evolution of data- and knowledge-management systems from centralized systems to decentralized systems enabling large-scale distributed applications providing high scalability. This, the 43rd issue of Transactions on Large-Scale Data- and Knowledge-Centered Systems, contains five revised selected regular papers. Topics covered include classification tasks, machine learning algorithms, top-k queries, business process redesign and a knowledge capitalization framework.

Issues in Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and Machine Learning: 2013 Edition is a ScholarlyEditions™ book that delivers timely, authoritative, and comprehensive information about Expert Systems. The editors have built Issues in Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and Machine Learning: 2013 Edition on the vast information databases of ScholarlyNews.™ You can expect the information about Expert Systems in this book to be deeper than what you can access anywhere else, as well as consistently reliable, authoritative, informed, and relevant. The content of Issues in Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and Machine Learning: 2013 Edition has been produced by the world’s leading scientists, engineers, analysts, research institutions, and companies. All of the content is from peer-reviewed sources, and all of it is written, assembled, and edited by the editors at ScholarlyEditions™ and available exclusively from us. You now have a source you can cite with authority, confidence, and credibility. More information is available at http://www.ScholarlyEditions.com/.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications, DASFAA 2009, held in Brisbane, Australia, in April 2009. The 39 revised full papers and 22 revised short papers presented together with 3 invited keynote papers, 9 demonstration papers, 3 tutorial abstracts, and one panel abstract were carefully reviewed and selected from 186 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on uncertain data and ranking, sensor networks, graphs, RFID and data streams, skyline and rising stars, parallel and distributed processing, mining and analysis, XML query, privacy, XML keyword search and ranking, Web and Web services, XML data processing, and multimedia.

This handbook covers a wide range of topics related to the collection, processing, analysis, and use of geospatial data in their various forms. This handbook provides an overview of how spatial computing technologies for big data can be organized and implemented to solve real-world problems. Diverse subdomains ranging from indoor mapping and navigation over trajectory computing to earth observation from space, are also present in this handbook. It combines fundamental contributions focusing on spatio-textual analysis, uncertain databases, and spatial statistics with application examples such as road network detection or colocation detection using GPUs. In summary, this handbook gives an essential introduction and overview of the rich field of spatial information science and big geospatial data. It introduces three different perspectives, which together define the field of big geospatial data: a societal, governmental, and governance perspective. It discusses questions of how the acquisition, distribution and exploitation of big geospatial data must be organized both on the scale of companies and countries. A second perspective is a theory-oriented set of contributions on arbitrary spatial data with contributions introducing into the exciting field of spatial statistics or into uncertain databases. A third perspective is taking a very practical perspective to big geospatial data, ranging from chapters that describe how big geospatial data infrastructures can be implemented and how specific applications can be implemented on top of big geospatial data. This would include for example, research in historic map data, road network extraction, damage estimation from remote sensing imagery, or the analysis of spatio-textual collections and social media. This multi-disciplinary approach makes the book unique. This handbook can be used as a reference for undergraduate students, graduate students and researchers focused on big geospatial data. Professionals can use this book, as well as practitioners facing big collections of geospatial data.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Web-Age Information Management, WAIM 2013, held in Beidaihe, China, in June 2013. The 47 revised full papers presented together with 29 short papers and 5 keynotes were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 248 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on data mining; information integration and heterogeneous systems; big data; spatial and temporal databases; information extraction; new hardware and miscellaneous; query processing and optimization; social network and graphs; information retrieval; workflow systems and service computing; recommender systems; security, privacy, and trust; semantic Web and ontology.

This two volume set LNCS 7238 and LNCS 7239 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications, DASFAA 2012, held in Busan, South Korea, in April 2012. The 44 revised full papers and 8 short papers presented together with 2 invited keynote papers, 8 industrial papers, 8 demo presentations, 4 tutorials and 1 panel paper were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 159 submissions. The topics covered are query processing and optimization, data semantics, XML and semi-structured data, data mining and knowledge discovery, privacy and anonymity, data management in the Web, graphs and data mining applications, temporal and spatial data, top-k and skyline query processing, information retrieval and recommendation, indexing and search systems, cloud computing and scalability, memory-based query processing, semantic and decision support systems, social data, data mining.