Yannis Ioannidis – författare

In many of nowadays web-based environments for electronic marketing and commerce, that present large multimedia product and service catalogues, it becomes more and more difficult to provide naive end users, such as private consumers or commercial business partners, with intuitive user interfaces to access the large multimedia collections describing the presented products and services. The same holds for marketing managers and other employees responsible for managing and maintaining the large and constantly changing set of multimedia information chunks and fragments contained in these collections. As a consequence, many efforts are devoted to improve the quality of the interaction between users and databases. Virtual Reality (VR) techniques are a promising interaction paradigm particularly suited to novice and/or occasional users. The users are facilitated in the database navigation since the system proposes them an environment that reproduces a real situation and gives the possibilityof interacting by manipulating objects that have a direct correspondence with known objects.

This book presents the state-of-the-art in visual interfaces and database systems and covers the following topics in detail: next generation interfaces, visual representations, three-dimensional interfaces, modeling of visual information, image understanding and processing and video databases.

In many of nowadays web-based environments for electronic marketing and commerce, that present large multimedia product and service catalogues, it becomes more and more difficult to provide naive end users, such as private consumers or commercial business partners, with intuitive user interfaces to access the large multimedia collections describing the presented products and services. The same holds for marketing managers and other employees responsible for managing and maintaining the large and constantly changing set of multimedia information chunks and fragments contained in these collections. As a consequence, many efforts are devoted to improve the quality of the interaction between users and databases. Virtual Reality (VR) techniques are a promising interaction paradigm particularly suited to novice and/or occasional users. The users are facilitated in the database navigation since the system proposes them an environment that reproduces a real situation and gives the possibilityof interacting by manipulating objects that have a direct correspondence with known objects.

The series of International Conferences on Extending Database Technology (EDBT) is an established and prestigious forum for the exchange of the latest research results in data management. It provides unique opportunities for database researchers, practitioners, developers, and users to explore new ideas, techniques, and tools, and to exchange experiences. This volume contains the proceedings of the 10th EDBT Conference, held in Munich, Germany, March 27-29, 2006. The conference included 3 keynote talks, 56 full-size and 4 half-size research papers in 20 sessions, 8 industrial presentations in 3 sessions, 1 panel session, 5 tutorials in 7 sessions, and 20 demonstrations in 4 sessions. All of the research papers as well as papers and abstracts from most of the other sessions are included here. Distinguished members of the database and information-retrieval communities delivered the three keynotes, which were all in the spirit of the banner theme chosen for EDBT 2006: “From Database Systems to Universal Data Management. ” Martin Kersten, a pioneer in the area of database support for ambient application environments and the investigator of several kernel database architectures, discussed various hard issues that arise in organic database systems, i. e. , systems that can be embedded in several hardware applications and have autonomic behavior. Alan Smeaton, a leader in content-based retrieval of information in a wide variety of media, introduced us to the world of digital video libraries and challenged us with several open problems associated with their effective management.

The series of International Conferences on Extending Database Technology (EDBT) is an established and prestigious forum for the exchange of the latest research results in data management. It provides unique opportunities for database researchers, practitioners, developers, and users to explore new ideas, techniques, and tools, and to exchange experiences. This volume contains the proceedings of the 10th EDBT Conference, held in Munich, Germany, March 27-29, 2006. The conference included 3 keynote talks, 56 full-size and 4 half-size research papers in 20 sessions, 8 industrial presentations in 3 sessions, 1 panel session, 5 tutorials in 7 sessions, and 20 demonstrations in 4 sessions. All of the research papers as well as papers and abstracts from most of the other sessions are included here. Distinguished members of the database and information-retrieval communities delivered the three keynotes, which were all in the spirit of the banner theme chosen for EDBT 2006: “From Database Systems to Universal Data Management. ” Martin Kersten, a pioneer in the area of database support for ambient application environments and the investigator of several kernel database architectures, discussed various hard issues that arise in organic database systems, i. e. , systems that can be embedded in several hardware applications and have autonomic behavior. Alan Smeaton, a leader in content-based retrieval of information in a wide variety of media, introduced us to the world of digital video libraries and challenged us with several open problems associated with their effective management.

The series of East European Conferences on Advances in Databases and Information Systems (ADBIS) is an established and prestigious forum for the exchange of the latest research results in data management. It provides unique opportunities for database researchers, practitioners, developers, and users from East European countries to explore new ideas, techniques, and tools, and to exchange experiences with colleagues from the rest of the world. This volume contains the proceedings of the 11th ADBIS Conference, held in Varna, Bulgaria, September 29 – October 3, 2007. The conference included 3 keynote talks, 36 research papers in 13 sessions, and 2 tutorials. Twenty-tree of the research papers as well as papers or extended abstracts for the keynote talks are included here; the remaining papers appear in local proceedings. Distinguished members of the database and information-retrieval communities delivered the three keynotes. Timos Sellis, an expert in the area of multidimensional indexing and data warehousing, analyzed the entire lifecycle of ETL workflows, from specification to optimized execution, offering solutions as well as future challenges. Gerhard Weikum, a leader of several efforts falling at the intersection of databases and information retrieval, discussed the emergence of several “Webs” and how these may be harvested and searched for knowledge. Finally, Paolo Atzeni, well-known for several contributions to database theory, addressed the perennial problem of schema and data translation in the context of emerging model management systems and outlined several research challenges that emerge.