Data management has evolved over the years from being strictly associated with database systems, through active databases, to being a topic that has grown beyond the scope of a single field encompassing multiple aspects: distributed systems, event-driven systems, and peer-to-peer and streaming systems. The present collection of works,...

The typical computational approach to object understanding derives shape information from the 2D outline of the objects. For complex object structures, however, such a planar approach cannot determine object shape; the structural edges have to be encoded in terms of their full 3D spatial configuration. Computer Vision: From Surfaces...

GeoComputation (GC) is a follow-on revolution that is occurring after the introduction of geographical information systems (GIS). It is expected to gather speed and momentum in the first decade of the 21st century. The rationale behind this latest revolution is quite simple. When we have finished creating our GIS databases, set up our...

3D scene understanding and object recognition are among the grandest challenges in computer vision. A wide variety of techniques and goals, such as structure from motion, optical flow, stereo, edge detection, and segmentation, could be viewed as subtasks within scene understanding and recognition. Many of these applicable methods are...

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...

Event-based distributed systems are playing an ever increasing role in areas such as enterprise management, information dissemination, finance, environmental monitoring and geo-spatial systems. Event-based processing originated with the introduction of Event-Condition-Action (ECA) rules to database systems in the 1980s. Since then,...

After over fifteen years of research and trial and error, micromap designs have evolved to the point where they are slowly finding their way into mainstream statistical visualizations. Now seems to be a good time to pull all of the work together into a book in order to introduce micromaps to a wide range of people interested in...

Environmental remote sensing is the measurement, from a distance, of the spectral features of the Earth’s surface and atmosphere. These measurements are normally made by instruments carried by satellites or aircraft, and are used to infer the nature and characteristics of the land or sea surface, or of the atmosphere, at the...

Humans receive the great majority of information about their environment through sight, and at least 50% of the human brain is dedicated to vision. Vision is also a key component for building artificial systems that can perceive and understand their environment. Computer vision is likely to change society in many ways; for example, it...

A constraint is a restriction on a space of possibilities; it is a piece of knowledge that narrows the scope of this space. Because constraints arise naturally in most areas of human endeavor, they are the most general means for formulating regularities that govern our computational, physical, biological, and social worlds. Some...

Online auctions are an increasingly important marketplace, as the new mechanisms and formats underlying these auctions have enabled the capturing and recording of large amounts of bidding data that are used to make...