Semantics In Databases

Providing a comprehensive theory of data modelling, this book explains the important concepts and principles with real-life examples showing how to apply it directly in practical applications. Topics covered include: a wide variety of functional requirements and query specification capabilities; a formal treatment of the semantics of the data; static and dynamic constraints and business rules; operations on tables, databases, and database universes; data dictionaries and their semantics; and comparisons of incidental properties and structural properties throughout the book. The book is aimed at professional database users such as designers, administrators and programmers, as well as specialists involved in data processing.

This book presents a coherent suvey on exciting developments in database semantics. The origins of the volume date back to a workshop held in Prague, Czech Republic, in 1995. The nine revised full papers and surveys presented were carefully reviewed for inclusion in the book. They address more traditional aspects like dealing with integrity constraints and conceptual modeling as well as new areas of databases; object-orientation, incomplete information, database transformations and other issues are investigated by applying formal semantics, e.g. the evolving algebra semantics.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Semantics in Databases, held in Dagstuhl Castle, Germany, in January 2001. The 10 revised full papers presented together with an introduction by the volume editors were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing. Among the aspects of database semantics discussed are semantic constraints, paraconsistency, logic foundations of databases, ER modeling, type hierarchies, null values, consistency enforcement, logic-based pattern languages, and semantic classification of queries. Among the classes of databases dealt with are deductive databases, relational databases, distributed information systems, and tree-structured data.

Database Semantics: Semantic Issues in Multimedia Systems reflects the state of the art of emerging research on the meaning of multimedia information, as presented during IFIP's Eighth Data Semantics Working Conference (DS-8), organized by its Working Group 2.6 on Databases, and held at Rotorua, New Zealand, in January 1999. DS-8 was planned as an active forum for researchers and practitioners focusing on those issues that involve the semantics of the information represented, stored, and manipulated by multimedia systems. Depending on the topic and state of research, issues may be covered either deeply theoretically or quite practically, or even both. These proceedings contain twenty-one papers carefully selected by an International Programme Committee and organized in six thematic areas: Video Data Modelling and Use; Image Databases; Applications of Multimedia Systems; Multimedia Modeling in General; Multimedia Information Retrieval; Semantics and Metadata. For almost every area, important topics and issues include: data modeling and query languages for media such as audio, video, and images; methodological aspects of multimedia database design; intelligent multimedia information retrieval; knowledge discovery and data mining in multimedia information; multimedia user interfaces. Three visionary keynote addresses, by famous experts Ramesh Jain, Hermann Maurer and Masao Sakauchi, set the stage for discussion and future directions for the field. The collection of papers that resulted now offers a glimpse of the excitement and enthusiasm from DS-8. Database Semantics: Semantic Issues in Multimedia Systems is suitable as a secondary text for a graduate-level course on database systems, multimedia systems, or information retrieval systems and as a reference for practitioners and researchers in industry.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Semantics in Databases, held in Dagstuhl Castle, Germany, in January 2001. The 10 revised full papers presented together with an introduction by the volume editors were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing. Among the aspects of database semantics discussed are semantic constraints, paraconsistency, logic foundations of databases, ER modeling, type hierarchies, null values, consistency enforcement, logic-based pattern languages, and semantic classification of queries. Among the classes of databases dealt with are deductive databases, relational databases, distributed information systems, and tree-structured data.

The explosion in data exchange fostered by the success of the Web has restated semantics as a kernel issue in the development of services providing data and - formationtousersandapplicationsworldwide. Thisnewlydesignatedconference serieson"SemanticsfortheNetworkedWorld"uni?esintoasingleframework the previous series on "Database Semantics" and "Visual Database Systems" that the IFIP WG 2.6 has been o?ering since 1985. Whereas the intent of the conferenceseriesistoexploreinterestingresearchissuesrelatedtosemantics, the themeforthe2004editionis"SemanticsforGridDatabases". Gridcomputing, a new?eld concentrating on "?exible, secure, coordinated resource sharing among dynamic collections of individuals, institutions, and resources (also referred to as virtual organizations)", has gathered momentum in the context of providing shared infrastructures for large-scale scienti?c computations and data analysis. Similarly, P2P computing has attracted substantial attention. Currently, attention is devoted to the provision of middleware services to makecomputationalresourcesinteroperableatthetechnicallevelandtoincrease the e?ciency of use of physical resources. However, as Grid and P2P computing infrastructures are being increasingly adopted, they are likely to have typical problems of information overload that manifest themselves in any large-scale infrastructure for information and application sharing (e.g., the WWW). The need for resource discovery, application and service interoperability, integration and composition manifest themselves in these infrastructures. The ability to interoperate at the semantic level will largely determine the continued success and utilization of these infrastructures

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed postproceedings of the Second International Workshop on Semantic Web and Databases, SWDB 2004, held in Toronto, Canada in August 2004 as a satellite workshop of VLDB 2004. The 14 revised full papers presented together with 2 papers by the invited keynote speakers were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvement from 47 submissions. Among the topics addressed are data semantics, semantic Web services, service-oriented computing, workflow composition, XML semantics, relational tables, ontologies, semantic Web algebra, heterogeneous data sources, context mediation, OWL, ontology engineering, data integration, semantic Web queries, database queries, and peer-to-peer warehouses.

Efficient access to data, sharing data, extracting information from data, and making use of the information have become urgent needs for today's corporations. With so much data on the Web, managing it with conventional tools is becoming almost impossible. New tools and techniques are necessary to provide interoperability as well as warehousing betw