There is probably no invention in the history of mankind that had such a profound impact on our lives in such a short time as the World Wide Web. Twenty years ago, Tim Berners-Lee has developed the first versions of HTML which allowed to weave documents into the large hypertext document that we know today. It was soon realized that...

Anybody following the discussions around “Web Services” in recent years is aware of the fuzzy definition of the term, and a little bit of history can quite easily explain some of the confusions around current terminology (or use of terminology). The general idea of using Web technologies to not only deliver Web pages (HTML...

One of the most debated consequences regarding the increased availability and use of information and communication technologies (ICTs), especially since the early 1990s, have been their impact on economic growth. Generally speaking, ICT can serve to reduce transaction costs at all levels of a commercial transaction. With the emergence...

Grid Computing was a vision of using and sharing computers and data in the early 1990s. The integration, coordination, and sharing of computer resources which are geographically disperse among different physical domains and organizations became an every day reality. This emerging infrastructure aims to provide a mechanism for sharing...

People often ask me why I chose to publish this work. Primarily, this book was motivated by my experience in industry after having been in the academic world for many years. We often hear about the need to bridge the gap between industry and academia, but one can easily intellectually understand something without having experienced it...

Results matter, whether you are a mathematician, scientist, or engineer. The time that you spend doing tedious mathematical calculations could be spent in more productive ways. Sage is an open-source mathematical software system that helps you perform many mathematical tasks. There is no reason to compute integrals or perform algebraic...

In 2009, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates announced the company's leading web application platform for organizations, SharePoint, has exceeded 1 billion dollars in profits with over 100 million licenses sold. I was in the audience when he said that and couldn't help but reflect on how far SharePoint has come in less than a decade. In the...

This book has evolved from class notes for the undergraduate Automation and Robotics course at the National Taiwan University. The course was originally designed for senior students in the Department of Civil Engineering, enhancing their understanding of robotics technology and its potential. As this course does not have any...

This volume contains the proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems (TACAS 2011). TACAS 2011 took place in Saarbr¨ucken, Germany, March 28–31, 2011, as part of the 14th European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software (ETAPS 2011), whose...

This book provides detailed recipes that describe how to use the features of Cassandra and improve its performance. Recipes cover topics ranging from setting up Cassandra...

Geospatial semantics (GEOS) is an emerging research area in the domain of geographic information science. It aims at exploring strategies, computational methods, and tools to support...