Radiocarbon After Four Decades: An Interdisciplinary Perspective commemorates the 40th anniversary of radiocarbon dating. The volume presents discussions of every aspect of this dating technique, as well as chronicles of its development and views of future advancements and applications. All of the 64 authors played major roles in establishment, development or application of this revolutionary scientific tool. The 35 chapters provide a solid foundation in the essential topics of radiocarbon dating: Historical Perspectives; The Natural Carbon Cycle; Instrumentation and Sample Preparation; Hydrology; Old World Archaeology; New World Archaeology; Earth Sciences; and Biomedical Applications.

The Third International Symposium on Large Spatial Databases (SSD '93) was held at the National University of Singapore in June 1993. The previous meetings of the series were at Sanata Barbara (1989) and Zurich (1991). The meetings are planned as a forum for researchers and practitioners specializing in database theory for and advanced applications of Spatial Information Systems. This volume constitutes the proceedings of the symposium. It contains 25 selected papersand three keynotes papers: "Spatial data management in database systems: research directions" (W. Kim), "From extensible databases to interoperability between multiple databases and GIS applications" (H.-J. Schek), and "The SEQUOIA 2000 project" (M. Stonebraker). The selectedpapers are collected into sections on: data modeling, spatial indexing, indexing mechanisms, handling of raster and vector data, spatial database systems, topology, storage management, query retrieval,knowledge engineering in SDS, and 3-dimensional data handling.

The authors explore and explain current techniques for handling the specialised data that describes geographical phenomena in a study that will be of great value to computer scientists and geographers working with spatial databases.

Although there are many advanced and specialized texts and handbooks on algorithms, until now there was no book that focused exclusively on the wide variety of data structures that have been reported in the literature. The Handbook of Data Structures and Applications responds to the needs of students, professionals, and researchers who need a mainstream reference on data structures by providing a comprehensive survey of data structures of various types. Divided into seven parts, the text begins with a review of introductory material, followed by a discussion of well-known classes of data structures, Priority Queues, Dictionary Structures, and Multidimensional structures. The editors next analyze miscellaneous data structures, which are well-known structures that elude easy classification. The book then addresses mechanisms and tools that were developed to facilitate the use of data structures in real programs. It concludes with an examination of the applications of data structures. The Handbook is invaluable in suggesting new ideas for research in data structures, and for revealing application contexts in which they can be deployed. Practitioners devising algorithms will gain insight into organizing data, allowing them to solve algorithmic problems more efficiently.

Higher-dimensional modelling of geographic information

Introduced forty years ago, relational databases proved unusually succe- ful and durable. However, relational database systems were not designed for modern applications and computers. As a result, specialized database systems now proliferate trying to capture various pieces of the database market. Database research is pulled into di?erent directions, and speci- ized database conferences are created. Yet the current chaos in databases is likely only temporary because every technology, including databases, becomes standardized over time. The history of databases shows periods of chaos followed by periods of dominant technologies. For example, in the early days of computing, users stored their data in text ?les in any format and organization they wanted. These early days were followed by information retrieval systems, which required some structure for text documents, such as a title, authors, and a publisher. The information retrieval systems were followed by database systems, which added even more structure to the data and made querying easier. In the late 1990s, the emergence of the Internet brought a period of relative chaos and interest in unstructured and “semistructured data” as it wasenvisionedthateverywebpagewouldbelikeapageinabook.However, with the growing maturity of the Internet, the interest in structured data was regained because the most popular websites are, in fact, based on databases. The question is not whether future data stores need structure but what structure they need.

Pattern recognition is an active area of research with many applications, some of which have reached commercial maturity. Structural and syntactic methods are very powerful. They are based on symbolic data structures together with matching, parsing, and reasoning procedures that are able to infer interpretations of complex input patterns.This book gives an overview of the latest developments and achievements in the field.

Socio-organizational Aspects of Expert Systems to Storage and Retrieval: Signature File Access

Differing from other books on the subject, this one uses the framework of constraint databases to provide a natural and powerful generalization of relational databases. An important theme running through the text is showing how relational databases can smoothly develop into constraint databases, without sacrificing any of the benefits of relational databases whilst gaining new advantages. Peter Revesz begins by discussing data models and how queries may be addressed to them. From here, he develops the theory of relational and constraint databases, including Datalog and the relational calculus, concluding with three sample constraint database systems -- DISCO, DINGO, and RATHER. Advanced undergraduates and graduates in computer science will find this a clear introduction to the subject, while professionals and researchers will appreciate this novel perspective on their subject.