Athena Vakali

Yannis Tzitzikas

Marco Mesiti

Wolfgang Lindner

Can Türker

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed joint post-proceedings of five workshops held as part of the 9th International Conference on Extending Database Technology, EDBT 2004, held in Heraklion, Crete, Greece, in March 2004. The 55 revised full papers presented together with 2 invited papers and the summaries of 2 panels were selected from numerous submissions during two rounds of reviewing and revision. In accordance with the topical focus of the respective workshops, the papers are organized in sections on database technology in general (PhD Workshop), database technologies for handling XML information on the Web, pervasive information management, peer-to-peer computing and databases, and clustering information over the Web.

EDBT 2004 Workshops PhD, DataX, PIM, P2P&DB, and ClustWeb, Heraklion, Crete, Greece, March 14-18, 2004, Revised Selected Papers

Current Trends in Database Technology - EDBT 2004 Workshops

Giovanni Maria Sacco

Current access paradigms for the Web, i.e., direct access via search engines or database queries and navigational access via static taxonomies, have recently been criticized because they are too rigid or simplistic to effectively cope with a large number of practical search applications. A third paradigm, dynamic taxonomies and faceted search, focuses on user-centered conceptual exploration, which is far more frequent in search tasks than retrieval using exact specification, and has rapidly become pervasive in modern Web data retrieval, especially in critical applications such as product selection for e-commerce. It is a heavily interdisciplinary area, where data modeling, human factors, logic, inference, and efficient implementations must be dealt with holistically. Sacco, Tzitzikas, and their contributors provide a coherent roadmap to dynamic taxonomies and faceted search. The individual chapters, written by experts in each relevant field and carefully integrated by the editors, detail aspects like modeling, schema design, system implementation, search performance, and user interaction. The basic concepts of each area are introduced, and advanced topics and recent research are highlighted. An additional chapter is completely devoted to current and emerging application areas, including e-commerce, multimedia, multidimensional file systems, and geographical information systems. The presentation targets advanced undergraduates, graduate students and researchers from different areas – from computer science to library and information science – as well as advanced practitioners. Given that research results are currently scattered among very different publications, this volume will allow researchers to get a coherent and comprehensive picture of the state of the art.

Theory, Practice, and Experience

Dynamic Taxonomies and Faceted Search

Yannis Marketakis

This book explains the main problems related to digital preservation using examples based on a modern version of the well-known Cinderella fairy tale. Digital preservation is the endeavor to protect digital material against loss, corruption, hardware/software technology changes, and changes in the knowledge of the community. Τhe structure of the book is modular, with each chapter consisting of two parts: the episode and the technical background. The episodes narrate the story in chronological order, exactly as in a fairy tale. In addition to the story itself, each episode is related to one or more digital preservation problems, which are discussed in the technical background section of the chapter. To reveal a more general and abstract formulation of these problems, the notion of pattern is used. Each pattern has a name, a summary of the problem, a narrative describing an attempt to solve the problem, an explanation of what could have been done to avoid or alleviate this problem, some lessons learned, and lastly, links to related patterns discussed in other chapters. The book is intended for anyone wanting to understand the problems related to digital preservation, even if they lack the technical background. It explains the technical details at an introductory level, provides references to the main approaches (or solutions) currently available for tackling related problems, and is rounded out by questions and exercises appropriate for computer engineers and scientists. In addition, the book's website, maintained by the authors, presents the contents of Cinderella's “real USB stick,” and includes links to various tools and updates.

A Fairy Tale for Digital Preservation

Cinderella's Stick

Yannis Tzitzikas

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