The Bulletin of the Technical Committee on Data Engineering is published quarterly and is distributed to all TC members. Its scope includes the design, implementation, modelling, theory and application of database systems and their technology. Letters, conference information, and news should be sent to the Editor-in-Chief. Papers for each issue are solicited by and should be sent to the Associa...

Our paper makes use of the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) in order to derive the willingness to pay (WTP) for complex goods with a range of attributes and attribute levels. Weights obtained from the AHP are used to decompose the aggregate WTP obtained from Contingent Valuation (CV) in a hypothetical simulated market. The empirical analysis uses consumer-level questionnaires to elicit inform...

On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) based on a dimensional view of data is being used increasingly in traditional business applications as well as in applications such as health care for the purpose of analyzing very large amounts of data. Pre-aggregation, the prior materialization of aggregate queries for later use, is an essential technique for ensuring adequate response time during data ana...

Social choice and welfare economics are subjects at the frontier of many disciplines. Even if economics played the major rôle in their development, sociology, psychology and, principally, political science, mathematics and philosophy have been central for the manifold inventiveness of the employed methods and for the diversity of the studied topics. This phenomenon can be compared with game the...

This paper describes the philosophy behind our tool called “Legal Taxonomy Syllabus”, the analytical instruments it provides and some case studies. The Legal Taxonomy Syllabus is an ontology based tool designed to annotate and recover multi-lingua legal information and build conceptual dictionaries. The Legal Taxonomy Syllabus allows to build legal dictionaries in a bottom up fashion starting f...

An analytical study of potential pathological performance areas of the Seamless architecture is presented. Seamless is a latency-tolerant, distributed memory, multi-processor architecture. A key component of the philosophy of Seamless, however, is the use of standard, commodity components for a large part of the system. A discussion of the unavoidable implementation compromises imposed by this ...

It is a pervasive assumption in recent analytical philosophy that knowledge can be defined as a modality representing a rational agent's true and consistent beliefs. Such views are based on rationality assumptions. One is that knowledge can only consist of true propositions. This way of speaking is sharply at odds with the way we speak about knowledge, for example, in computing, where a so-call...

Silvia Jonas has written an important and lucid book about a ‘notoriously elusive’ topic ‘that has baffled philosophical minds for over two thousand years’ (p. 1). Yet the rise of new philosophical standards, focussed on analytical rigour, logical stringency, and scientific mindedness, has allowed the topic of ineffability, which, by definition, deals with what is beyond linguistic grasp, to be...

This paper describes a type of didactic material used when teaching electromagnetism. The purpose is to guide the students to verify the results of a Finite Element (FE) simulation using those obtained analytically. This procedure has shown to be of great help during their learning of the FE method. The example in this paper uses a 2D analytical method to estimate the magnetic field generated b...