While the European Union (EU) harmonized methodology is a benchmark of worldwide used business survey (BS) methodology, the choice of variables that are components of the confidence indicators, as the leading indicators, is not strictly determined and unique. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to investigate and to quantify the relationship between all business survey variables in manufacturin...

KI 2009 is the 32nd edition of the German Conference on Artificial Intelligence, which traditionally brings together academic and industrial researchers from all areas of AI. The technical programme of KI 2009 will comprise paper and poster presentations and a variety of workshops and tutorials. We invite proposals for workshops to be held at the beginning of the conference. Eligible topics inc...

More than 200 years ago, Moravian settlers created a community with an integrated industrial area along the Monocacy Creek in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Greatly admired throughout the colonies, the industrial site bustled with activity. Today, Bethlehem's Colonial Industrial Quarter, which covers 10 acres, is the largest and most diverse preIndustrial Revolution technology site under restoration ...

Brazil’s economy continues the expansion that began in the last quarter of 1999. The Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics has reported that GDP, relative to 1999, grew 3.08% during the first quarter. The industrial sector was especially strong. Led by autos and capital goods products, the sector’s output jumped some 8%. Moreover, automobile production in May reached 150,000 units, th...

This special issue contains improved versions of selected papers from the workshops on Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems (FMICS) held in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, in November 2009 and in Antwerp, Belgium, in September 2010. These were, respectively, the 14th and 15th of a series of international workshops organized by an open working group supported by ERCIM (European Research Co...

ECCBR 2008 is the 9th European Conference on Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) following a series of successful European conferences and workshops. This four-day conference will be held at the University of Trier in Germany from 1–4 September 2008. The conference programme will include invited talks, oral and poster presentations as well as workshops (see separate calls) on both fundamental and applie...

This paper elaborates on ontology-based end-user visual query formulation, particularly for users who otherwise cannot/do not desire to use formal textual query languages to retrieve data due to the lack of technical knowledge and skills. Then, it provides a set of quality attributes and features, primarily elicited via a series of industrial enduser workshops and user studies carried out in th...