Calendar and time units and specialized units, such as business days and academic years, play a major role in a wide range of information system applications. System support for reasoning about these units, called granularities, is important for the efficient design, use, and implementation of such applications. This book deals with several aspects of temporal information and provides a unifying model for granularities. Practitioners can learn about critical aspects that must be taken into account when designing and implementing databases supporting temporal information.

The Seventh International Symposium on Spatial and Temporal Databases (SSTD 2001), held in Redondo Beach, CA, USA, July 12{15, 2001, brought together leading researchers and developers in the area of spatial, temporal, and spatio-temporal databases to discuss the state of the art in spatial and temporal data management and applications, and to understand the challenges and - search directions in the advancing area of data management for moving objects. The symposium served as a forum for disseminating research in spatial and temporal data management, and for maximizing the interchange of knowledge among researchers from the established spatial and temporal database com- nities. The exchange of research ideas and results not only contributes to the academic arena, but also bene ts the user and commercial communities. SSTD 2001 was the seventh in the series of symposia that started in Santa Barbara a dozen years ago and has since been held every two years, in Zurich, Singapore, Portland (Maine), Berlin, and Hong Kong. By 1999, the series had become well established as the premier international forum devoted solely to spatial database management, and it was decided to extend the scope of the series to also cover temporal database management. This extended scope was chosen due, in part, to the increasing importance of research that considers spatial and temporal aspects jointly.

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Symposium on Spatial and Temporal Databases, SSTD 2009, held in Aalborg, Denmark, in July 2009. The 20 revised full papers presented together with 3 keynotes, 7 short papers, and 10 demonstration papers, were thoroughly reviewed and selected from a total of 62 research submissions and 11 demonstration submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on spatial and flow networks, integrity and security, uncertain data and new technologies, indexing and monitoring moving objects, advanced queries, as well as on models and languages.

This book explores the concepts of data mining and data warehousing, a promising and flourishing frontier in database systems, and presents a broad, yet in-depth overview of the field of data mining. Data mining is a multidisciplinary field, drawing work from areas including database technology, artificial intelligence, machine learning, neural networks, statistics, pattern recognition, knowledge based systems, knowledge acquisition, information retrieval, high performance computing and data visualization.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Object Databases, ICOODB 2009, held in Zurich, Switzerland, in July 2009. The 6 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from the presentations at the research track during two rounds of reviewing and improvement. These papers address a wide range of issues related to object databases, including topics such as applications, methodologies, design tools, frameworks and standards as well as core object database technologies.

The Eighth International Conference on Extending Database Technology, EDBT 2002, was held in Prague, Czech Republic, March 25–27, 2002. It marks the 50th anniversary of Charles University’s Faculty of Mathematics and Physics and is the most recent in a series of conferences dedicated to the dissemination and exchange of the latest advances in data management. Previous conferences occurred in Konstanz, Valencia, Avignon, Cambridge, Vienna, and Venice. The topical theme of this year’s conference is Data Management in the New Millennium, which encourages the community to see beyond the management of massive databases by conventional database management systems and to extend database technology to support new services and application areas. The intention is to spur greater interest in more integrated solutions to user problems, which often implies the consideration of data management issues in entire information systems infrastructures. There is data (almost) everywhere, and data access is needed (almost) always and everywhere. New technologies, services, and app- cations that involve the broader notion of data management are emerging more rapidly than ever, and the database community has much to o?er. The call for papers attracted numerous submissions, including 207 research papers, which is a new record for EDBT. The program committee selected 36 research papers, 6 industrial and applications papers, 13 software demos, and 6 tutorials for presentation at the conference. In addition, the conference program includes three keynote speeches, by Jari Ahola, Ian Horrocks, and Hans-J ̈org Schek, and a panel.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications, DEXA 2008, held in Turin, Italy, in September 2008. The 74 revised full papers presented together with 1 invited paper were carefully reviewed and selected from 208 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on data privacy; temporal, spatial and high dimensional databases; semantic Web and ontologies; query processing; Web and information retrieval; mobile data and information; data and information streams; data mining algorithms; multimedia databases; data mining systems, data warehousing, OLAP; data and information semantics; XML databases; applications of database, information, and decision support systems; and schema, process and knowledge modelling and evolution.

Temporal Information Systems in Medicine introduces the engineering of information systems for medically-related problems and applications. The chapters are organized into four parts; fundamentals, temporal reasoning & maintenance in medicine, time in clinical tasks, and the display of time-oriented clinical information. The chapters are self-contained with pointers to other relevant chapters or sections in this book when necessary. Time is of central importance and is a key component of the engineering process for information systems. This book is designed as a secondary text or reference book for upper -undergraduate level students and graduate level students concentrating on computer science, biomedicine and engineering. Industry professionals and researchers working in health care management, information systems in medicine, medical informatics, database management and AI will also find this book a valuable asset.

Pattern recognition in data is a well known classical problem that falls under the ambit of data analysis. As we need to handle different data, the nature of patterns, their recognition and the types of data analyses are bound to change. Since the number of data collection channels increases in the recent time and becomes more diversified, many real-world data mining tasks can easily acquire multiple databases from various sources. In these cases, data mining becomes more challenging for several essential reasons. We may encounter sensitive data originating from different sources - those cannot be amalgamated. Even if we are allowed to place different data together, we are certainly not able to analyze them when local identities of patterns are required to be retained. Thus, pattern recognition in multiple databases gives rise to a suite of new, challenging problems different from those encountered before. Association rule mining, global pattern discovery and mining patterns of select items provide different patterns discovery techniques in multiple data sources. Some interesting item-based data analyses are also covered in this book. Interesting patterns, such as exceptional patterns, icebergs and periodic patterns have been recently reported. The book presents a thorough influence analysis between items in time-stamped databases. The recent research on mining multiple related databases is covered while some previous contributions to the area are highlighted and contrasted with the most recent developments.

The area of smart homes is fast developing as an emergent area which attracts the synergy of several areas of science. This volume offers a collection of contributions addressing how artificial intelligence (AI), one of the core areas of computer science, can bring the growing area of smart homes to a higher level of functionality where homes can truly realize the long standing dream of proactively helping their inhabitants in an intelligent way. After an introductory section to describe a smart home scenario and to provide some basic terminology, the following 9 sections turn special attention to a particular exemplar application scenario (provision of healthcare and safety related services to increase the quality of life) exploring the application of specific areas of AI to this scenario.