Amihai Motro – författare

As its title suggests, "Uncertainty Management in Information Systems" is a book about how information systems can be made to manage information permeated with uncertainty. This subject is at the intersection of two areas of knowledge: information systems is an area that concentrates on the design of practical systems that can store and retrieve information; uncertainty modeling is an area in artificial intelligence concerned with accurate representation of uncertain information and with inference and decision-making under conditions infused with uncertainty. New applications of information systems require stronger capabilities in the area of uncertainty management. Our hope is that lasting interaction between these two areas would facilitate a new generation of information systems that will be capable of servicing these applications. Although there are researchers in information systems who have addressed themselves to issues of uncertainty, as well as researchers in uncertainty modeling who have considered the pragmatic demands and constraints of information systems, to a large extent there has been only limited interaction between these two areas. As the subtitle, "From Needs to Solutions," indicates, this book presents view­ points of information systems experts on the needs that challenge the uncer­ tainty capabilities of present information systems, and it provides a forum to researchers in uncertainty modeling to describe models and systems that can address these needs.

As its title suggests, "Uncertainty Management in Information Systems" is a book about how information systems can be made to manage information permeated with uncertainty. This subject is at the intersection of two areas of knowledge: information systems is an area that concentrates on the design of practical systems that can store and retrieve information; uncertainty modeling is an area in artificial intelligence concerned with accurate representation of uncertain information and with inference and decision-making under conditions infused with uncertainty. New applications of information systems require stronger capabilities in the area of uncertainty management. Our hope is that lasting interaction between these two areas would facilitate a new generation of information systems that will be capable of servicing these applications. Although there are researchers in information systems who have addressed themselves to issues of uncertainty, as well as researchers in uncertainty modeling who have considered the pragmatic demands and constraints of information systems, to a large extent there has been only limited interaction between these two areas. As the subtitle, "From Needs to Solutions," indicates, this book presents view­ points of information systems experts on the needs that challenge the uncer­ tainty capabilities of present information systems, and it provides a forum to researchers in uncertainty modeling to describe models and systems that can address these needs.

As its title suggests, "Uncertainty Management in Information Systems" is a book about how information systems can be made to manage information permeated with uncertainty. This subject is at the intersection of two areas of knowledge: information systems is an area that concentrates on the design of practical systems that can store and retrieve information; uncertainty modeling is an area in artificial intelligence concerned with accurate representation of uncertain information and with inference and decision-making under conditions infused with uncertainty. New applications of information systems require stronger capabilities in the area of uncertainty management. Our hope is that lasting interaction between these two areas would facilitate a new generation of information systems that will be capable of servicing these applications. Although there are researchers in information systems who have addressed themselves to issues of uncertainty, as well as researchers in uncertainty modeling who have considered the pragmatic demands and constraints of information systems, to a large extent there has been only limited interaction between these two areas. As the subtitle, "From Needs to Solutions," indicates, this book presents view­ points of information systems experts on the needs that challenge the uncer­ tainty capabilities of present information systems, and it provides a forum to researchers in uncertainty modeling to describe models and systems that can address these needs.

ThisvolumeconstitutestheproceedingsoftheFifthInternationalConferenceon Flexible Query Answering Systems, FQAS 2002, held in Copenhagen, Denmark on October 27–29, 2002. FQAS is the premier conference for researchers and practitioners concerned with the vital task of providing easy, ?exible, and intuitive access to information for every type of need. This multidisciplinary conference draws on several re- arch areas, including databases, information retrieval, knowledge representation, soft computing, multimedia, and human–computer interaction. Previous FQAS events were held in 1994, 1996, 1998, and 2000. The overall theme of the FQAS conferences is innovative query systems - medatprovidingeasy,?exible,andintuitiveaccesstoinformation.Suchsystems are intended to facilitate retrieval from information repositories such as data- ses,libraries,andtheWorld-WideWeb.Theserepositoriesaretypicallyequipped with standard query systems which are often inadequate, and the focus of FQAS is the development of query systems that are more expressive, informative, c- perative, and productive. These proceedings contain 29 original papers that relate to the topic of users posing queries and systems producing answers. The papers cover the ?elds: - tabase Management, Information Retrieval, Domain Modeling, Knowledge - presentation and Ontologies, Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, Arti?cial Intelligence, Classical and Non-classical Logics, Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing, Multimedia Information Systems, and Human– Computer Interaction. We wish to thank the contributors for their excellent papers and the referees, publisher, and sponsors for their e?ort. Special thanks also to the invited sp- kers, members of the Advisory Board, and members of theProgram Committee. They made the success of FQAS 2002 possible.

Information technology is a rapidly changing field in which researchers and developers must continuously set their vision on the next generation of technologies and the systems that they enable. Suitably, Next-Generation Information Technologies and Systems (NGITS) is an ongoing series of workshops that provides a forum for presenting and discussing the latest advances in information technology. NGITS took are international events held in Israel; previous workshops took place in 1993, 1995, 1997, 1999 and 2002. The call for papers for the 2006 workshop was answered by 138 papers on a very diverse range of subjects, thus presenting a considerable challenge to the Program Committee. Each of these papers received professional reviewing from at least three experts, and eventually 32 papers (less than 25%) were selected for presentation at the workshop and inclusion in these proceedings. Of these, 28 are full-length papers and 4 are short papers. In addition, several research works were selected to display “poster” presentations, and a number of research projects exhibited demonstrations. Finally, the workshop featured three keynote lectures by notable experts. The selected papers may be classified roughly in ten broad areas: ? Information systems development ? Distributed systems ? Semi-structured data ? Data mining and agent-oriented computing ? User-oriented design ? Frameworks, models and taxonomies ? Simulation and incremental computing ? Information integration ? Security and privacy ? Next-generation applications This event is the culmination of efforts by many talented and dedicated individuals.

Information technology is a rapidly changing field in which researchers and developers must continuously set their vision on the next generation of technologies and the systems that they enable. Suitably, Next-Generation Information Technologies and Systems (NGITS) is an ongoing series of workshops that provides a forum for presenting and discussing the latest advances in information technology. NGITS took are international events held in Israel; previous workshops took place in 1993, 1995, 1997, 1999 and 2002. The call for papers for the 2006 workshop was answered by 138 papers on a very diverse range of subjects, thus presenting a considerable challenge to the Program Committee. Each of these papers received professional reviewing from at least three experts, and eventually 32 papers (less than 25%) were selected for presentation at the workshop and inclusion in these proceedings. Of these, 28 are full-length papers and 4 are short papers. In addition, several research works were selected to display “poster” presentations, and a number of research projects exhibited demonstrations. Finally, the workshop featured three keynote lectures by notable experts. The selected papers may be classified roughly in ten broad areas: ? Information systems development ? Distributed systems ? Semi-structured data ? Data mining and agent-oriented computing ? User-oriented design ? Frameworks, models and taxonomies ? Simulation and incremental computing ? Information integration ? Security and privacy ? Next-generation applications This event is the culmination of efforts by many talented and dedicated individuals.