Modern Web systems that provide content to heterogeneous user groups using different devices have to deal with varying context information to support context-awareness. Accomplishing this requirement necessitates sensing, processing, and representing that information. Still, up to now there is a lack of reusable solutions for efficient context management. Therefore, this paper presents a compon...

Knowledge-based systems (KBS) achieve their reasoning power mainly through the explicit representation and use of different kinds of knowledge about a certain domain. The comparison of different KBS revealed, however, that the design solutions for particular knowledge representation infrastructure differ, depending on the information to be integrated. This observation brings to the conclusion t...

Traditional (i.e. analytical) modelling practices in the social sciences rely on a very well established, although implicit, methodological protocol, both with respect to the way models are presented and to the kinds of analysis that are performed. Unfortunately, computersimulated models often lack such a reference to an accepted methodological standard. This is one of the main reasons for the ...

In medicine many exceptions occur. In medical practise and in knowledge-based systems too, it is necessary to consider them and to deal with them appropriately. In medical studies and in research exceptions shall be explained. We present a system that helps to explain cases that do not fit into a theoretical hypothesis. Our starting points are situations where neither a well-developed theory no...

The emergence of multimedia technology and the rapidly expanding image collections on the Internet have attracted significant research efforts in providing tools for effective retrieval and management of visual data. The need to find a desired image from a large collection is shared by many professional groups, including journalists, design engineers and art historians. Difficulties faced by te...

The IAEA continues to provide credible assurance to the international community regarding States’ adherences to their safeguards obligations under the nuclear NonProliferation Treaty. Generally, industrial activities, including those related to the nuclear fuel cycle, are operating on increasingly larger scales involving more equipment, more nuclear material products and flows. With limited res...

The article presents a review on vision-based solutions for driver assistance. These solutions support the driver to keep safe travel conditions. They use diverse sensing modalities for the recognition of the environment around the vehicle. Upon detection a critical safety situation they supply the driver with the warning. Four assistance systems have been addressed: TSR Traffic Sign Recognitio...

Since its first release, Jini became a promising technology to build fault tolerant distributed systems. The actual Jini architecture however lacks a strong security model. Based on a concrete example, this paper aims at reviewing the main security architectures that have been proposed by the research community and presents an evaluation of them. This work may serve as a basis for securing Jini...

There is rapidly growing interest in the use of market-based (MB) instruments in environmental policy. The papers in this session discuss three relatively new areas for such policies: groundwater contamination, nonpoint source surface-water pollution and carbon sequestration. The papers point out the potential for MB policies in these areas, but significant challenges remain. This comment highl...

The use of RDF to expose semantic data on the Web has seen a dramatic increase over the last few years. Nowadays, RDF datasets are so big and interconnected that, in fact, classical mono-node solutions present significant scalability problems when trying to manage big semantic data. MapReduce, a standard framework for distributed processing of great quantities of data, is earning a place among ...