This book contains the best papers of the Third International Conference on Software and Data Technologies (ICSOFT 2008), held in Porto, Portugal, which was organized by the Institute for Systems and Technologies of Information, Communication and Control (INSTICC), co-sponsored by the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC), in cooperation with the Interdisciplinary Institute for Collaboration and Research on Enterprise Systems and Technology (IICREST). The purpose of ICSOFT 2008 was to bring together researchers, engineers and practitioners interested in information technology and software development. The conference tracks were “Software Engineering”, “Information Systems and Data Management”, “Programming Languages”, “Distributed and Parallel Systems” and “Knowledge Engineering”. Being crucial for the development of information systems, software and data te- nologies encompass a large number of research topics and applications: from imp- mentation-related issues to more abstract theoretical aspects of software engineering; from databases and data-warehouses to management information systems and kno- edge-base systems; next to that, distributed systems, pervasive computing, data qu- ity and other related topics are included in the scope of this conference.
