The performance of current transaction processing systems largely depends on human experts for administration and tuning. These experts have to specify a multitude of internal control parameters in different subsystems for which finding appropriate settings is very difficult. Another shortcoming of manual system administration lies in its inability to quickly react to changing system and worklo...

ii Abstract This thesis proposes an object-oriented query language that is more powerful than many existing query languages. The language is formally speciied and its expressive power is demonstrated by giving four translation schemes from other prominent object-oriented query languages. Further, this query language can be supported by a query algebra and both the query language and query algeb...

Information-processing models of vision and cognition are inspired by procedural programming languages. Models that emphasize object-based representations are closely related to object-oriented programming languages. The concepts underlying object-oriented languages provide a theoretical framework for cognitive processing that differs markedly from that offered by procedural languages. This fra...

Most image processing systems contain a set of predeened data structures which represent images, edges, regions etc. However, there is usually little support for user-deened data types or for extensions of existing types. Furthermore, it is often diicult to store customized data structures in les, or to send them between diierent processes. In this article, an object-oriented communication sche...

Data Grids are used for managing massive amounts of data (Peta scale) that are distributed across heterogeneous storage systems. As such they are complex in nature and deal with multiple operations in the life-cycle of a data set from creation to usage to preservation to final disposition. Administering a data grid can be very challenging (not only for system administrators, but also for data p...

There are a number of programmable macro systems such as Lisp’s. While they can handle complex program transformation, they still have difficulty in handling some kinds of transformation typical in object-oriented programming. This paper examines this problem and, to address it, presents an advanced macro system based on ideas borrowed from reflection. Unlike other macro systems, our macro syst...

Metaphor is much more than a pyrotechnical flourish of language or a fascinating conceptual puzzle: it is a cognitive lever that allows speakers to leverage their knowledge of one domain to describe, reframe and understand another. Though NLP researchers tend to view metaphor as a problem to be solved, metaphor is perhaps more fittingly seen as a solution to be used, that is, as an important to...

One of the basic functionalities of database management systems (DBMSs) is to be able to process declarative user queries. The first generation of object-oriented DBMSs did not provide declarative query capabilities. However, the last decade has seen significant research in defining query models (including calculi, algebra and user languages) and in techniques for processing and optimizing them...