The computer program exclusion from Article 52 of the European Patent Convention (EPC) proved impossible to uphold as industry moved over to digital technology, and the Boards of Appeal of the European Patent Organisation (EPO) felt emboldened to circumvent the EPC in Vicom by creating the legal fiction of 'technical effect'. This...

For several years now, there has been a constant increase in the number of works on UML and object modelling. However, my practical experience of training (more than a thousand or so people trained in OMT, then UML since 1993…) convinced me that there is still another need that is not tended to by the multitude of books...

Don’t be fooled: Just because the Droid 2 is a smartphone doesn’t mean that it’s harboring some form of insidious intelligence. There’s no alien brain in the device. It isn’t going to take over the world, though it can intimidate you — that is, until you understand and accept that it’s your...

The Handbook of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering is the first comprehensive handbook covering these two important areas that have become interwoven in recent years. Many international experts contribute to this Hand book. Each article is written in a way that a practitioner of software engineering and knowledge engineering can...

Going Corporate: A Geek's Guide shows technology workers how to gain the understanding and skills necessary for becoming an effective, promotable manager or sought-after consultant or freelancer. Technology professionals typically dive deeply into small pieces of technology—like lines of code or the design of...

During the 1980's the flat relational model (relational model), which was initiated by Codd in 1970, gained immense popularity and acceptance in the market place. One of the main reasons for this success is that the relational model provides physical data independences i.e. changing the physical organization of the database does not...

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Millions of people around the world have many photos stored on their laptop and desktop computers, external hard drives, CDs and DVDs, and flash drives. Most images are just sitting there idle, waiting for the world to see them. Some have been unused for years. Up until now there has been no guide to help people find ways to use these...

This book provides an overview of steganography and digital watermarking, two areas of research which are generally referred to as "information hiding." Steganography studies ways to make communication invisible by hiding secrets in innocuous messages, whereas watermarking originated from the need for copyright protection of...

This book brings together representative views of recent research and practice in the area of relating software requirements and software architectures. We believe that all practicing requirements engineers and software architects, all researchers advancing our understanding and support for the relationship between software...

Privacy is a basic human need, and losing privacy is perceived as an extremely threatening experience. Privacy embraces solitude, personal space, or intimacy with family and friends and as such, it is a ubiquitous and trans-cultural phenomenon. Privacy leverages well-being; without privacy we are at risk of becoming physically or...

I first began developing social applications when Facebook opened up its developer platform in 2007, giving people like me a taste of the extensive social data that an application can use to improve growth and target personalization settings. At the time, I was building social fantasy sports applications for CBSSports.com, pulling user...