Transaction Management Support for Cooperative Application is a comprehensive report on a successful international project, called TRANSCOOP, carried out from 1994 to 1997 by a group of European scientists. But the book is also much more than that, namely, an ambitious attempt to integrate Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Workflow Management Systems (WFMS), and Transaction Processing (TP) technologies. The very term {\em cooperative transactions} is in itself contradictory. Cooperation technologies, such as CSCW, aim at providing a framework for information exchange between cooperating (human) participants. In contrast, traditional transaction technologies allow concurrent users to operate on shared data, while providing them with the illusion of complete isolation from each other. To overcome this contradiction, the TRANSCOOP researchers had to come up with a new and original notion of correctness of concurrent executions, based on controlled exchange of information between concurrent users. Merging histories in accordance with prespecified commutativity rules among concurrent operations provides transactional guarantees to activities such as cooperative designing, which until now had to be carried out sequentially. As an interesting consequence, it also provides a basis for management of consistency between disconnected or mobile users who operate independently and yet, must occasionally reconcile their work with each other.

Database Support for Workflow Management: The WIDE Project presents the results of the ESPRIT WIDE project on advanced database support for workflow management. The book discusses the state of the art in combining database management and workflow management technology, especially in the areas of transaction and exception management. This technology is complemented by a high-level conceptual workflow model and associated workflow application design methodology. In WIDE, advanced base technology is applied, like a distributed computing model based on the corba standard. The usability of the WIDE approach is documented in this book by a discussion of two real-world applications from the insurance and health care domains. Database Support for Workflow Management: The WIDE Project serves as an excellent reference, and may be used for advanced courses on database and workflow management systems.

An Overview of Multidatabase Systems: Past and Present / Athman Bouguettaya, Boualem Benatallah, Ahmed Elmagarmid / - Local Autonomy and Its Effects on Multidatabase Systems / Ahmed Elmagarmid, Weimin Du, Rafi Ahmed / - Semantic Similarities Between Objects in Multiple Databases / Vipul Kashyap, Amit Sheth / - Resolution of Representational Diversity in Multidatabase Systems / Joachim Hammer, Dennis McLeod / - Schema Integration: Past, Present, and Future / Sudha Ram, V. Ramesh / - Schema and Language Translation / Bogdan Czejdo, Le Gruenwald / - Multidatabase Languages / Paolo Missier, Marek Rusinkiewicz, W. Jin / - Interdependent Database Systems / George Karabatis, Marek Rusinkiewicz, Amit Sheth / - Correctness Criteria and Concurrency Control / Panos K. Chrysanthis, Krithi Ramamritham / - Transaction Management in Multidatabase Systems: Current Technologies and Formalisms / Ken Barker, Ahmed Elmagarmid / - Transaction-Based Recovery / Jari Veijalainen. ...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling, ER 2006, held in Tucson, AZ, USA in November 2006. The 37 revised full papers presented together with two keynote talks, two panel session papers, six industrial papers, and five demo/posters papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 158 submissions.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Business Information Systems, BIS 2007, held in Poznan, Poland in April 2007. Among the issues addressed in the 49 revised full papers presented together with one keynote lecture are business process management, Web services, ontologies, information retrieval, system design, agents and mobile applications, decision support, social issues, specific MIS issues.

This two-volume set LNCS 5331/5332 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the five confederated international conferences on Cooperative Information Systems (CoopIS 2008), Distributed Objects and Applications (DOA 2008), Grid computing, high performAnce and Distributed Applications (GADA 2008), Information Security (IS 2008), and Ontologies, Databases and Applications of Semantics (ODBASE 2008), held as OTM 2008 in Monterrey, Mexico, in November 2008. The 86 revised full and 9 revised short papers presented together with 5 invited papers and 4 keynote talks were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 292 submissions. Corresponding to the five OTM 2008 main conferences CoopIS, DOA, GADA, IS, and ODBASE the papers are organized in topical sections on Web service, business process technology, E-service management, distributed process management, schema matching, business process tracing, workflow and business applications, designing distributed systems, context in distributed systems, high availability, adaptive distributed systems, scheduling allocation, databases in grids, grid applications, data management and storage, new tendencies and approaches, intrusion detection, information hiding, data and risk management, access control, evaluation and implementation, semantic matching and similarity measuring, semantic searching, ontology development, ontology maintanence and evaluation, ontology applications, and semantic query processing.

Workflow management systems (WFMS) are enjoying increasing popular ity due to their ability to coordinate and streamline complex organizational processes within organizations of all sizes. Organizational processes are de scriptions of an organization's activities engineered to fulfill its mission such as completing a business contract or satisfying a specific customer request. Gaining control of these processes allows an organization to reengineer and improve each process or adapt them to changing requirements. The goal of WFMSs is to manage these organizational processes and coordinate their execution. was demonstrated in the first half The high degree of interest in WFMSs of the 1990s by a significant increase in the number of commercial products (once estimated to about 250) and the estimated market size (in combined $2 billion in 1996. Ensuing maturity product sales and services) of about is demonstrated by consolidations during the last year. Ranging from mere e-mail based calendar tools and flow charting tools to very sophisticated inte grated development environments for distributed enterprise-wide applications and systems to support programming in the large, these products are finding an eager market and opening up important research and development op portunities. In spite of their early success in the market place, however, the current generation of systems can benefit from further research and develop ment, especially for increasingly complex and mission-critical applications.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Data Engineering Issues in E-Commerce and Services, DEECS 2006 held in San Francisco, California, June 2006. The book presents 15 revised full papers and 8 revised short papers organized in topical sections on e-commerce services, business processes and services, data and knowledge engineering, business models and analysis, Web services, and e-commerce systems.

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.

This book describes the theory, algorithms, and practical implementation techniques behind transaction processing in information technology systems.