Mokrane Bouzeghoub - Böcker

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 post-proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Application of Natural Language to Information Systems, NLDB 2000, held in Versailles, France, in June 2000. The 29 revised full papers presented together with two invited papers and seven posters and demonstrations have passed through two rounds of reviewing and selection. The book offers topical sections on linguistics in information design, temporal databases, word-sense disambiguation, semantic relationships in databases, semantic and contextual document retrieval, natural language generation for answering email and OLAP, NLP techniques for information retrieval, Web information retrieval, technical databases, users and interactions in Web querying, and conceptual patterns.

This book presents the refereed proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Extending Database Technology, EDBT'96, held in Avignon, France in March 1996. The 31 full revised papers included were selected from a total of 178 submissions; also included are some industrial-track papers, contributed by partners of several ESPRIT projects. The volume is organized in topical sections on data mining, active databases, design tools, advanced DBMS, optimization, warehousing, system issues, temporal databases, the web and hypermedia, performance, workflow management, database design, and parallel databases.