Materialized views have recently seen a renewed interest in the research and commercial communitites because of their applications in warehousing, retailing, billing, visualization, integrity constraints, query optimization, and decision support. All leading database vendors are currently implementing in their systems materialized views...

Cognitive spatial concepts are qualitative in nature, i.e., they are based not so much on exact quantities but on comparisons between perceived magnitudes. We develop a qualitative model for the representation of spatial knowledge (in particular, of positional information about 2-dimensional projections) that is based only on locative...

In April 2009, one of the authors of this book, Thomas Meinl, was attending the World Wide Web conference in Madrid, Spain. There, he gave a talk, in which he presented the idea of Web service reservation via derivative mechanisms. During the following discussions, it became clear that for many researchers, practitioners and managers...

Mac OS X offers an amazing development environment for scores of technologies. It seems that developers from numerous camps are migrating to Mac en masse. Scan the room at any Ruby or Rails conference, for example, and you’ll see programmers coding on Macs almost exclusively. As developers move to Mac, almost inevitably they...

Game Jams are fun. They are a creative, exciting, social experience. The goal of a Game Jam is to design a video game, either alone or in teams, as fast as humanly possible; usually in a single weekend. Some Jams are also great for making board games or card games! Game Jams can be absolutely massive group events held in conference rooms and...