Natural language processing is often called an "Al-complete" task, in the sense that in order to truly process language (i.e. to comprehend, to translate, to generate) full understanding is required, which is itself the ultimate goal of Artificial Intelligence. For those who seek solutions to practical problems, this is not a...

The second, revised edition of this book covers all aspects of non-uniform rational B-splines necessary to design geometry in a computer-aided environment. Basic B-spline features, curve and surface algorithms, and state-of-the-art geometry tools are all discussed. Detailed code for design algorithms and computational tricks are covered, too,...

Business process management (BPM) is an established research domain for computer science, information systems, and management scholars. The record number and wide scope of submissions to the eighth installation of the International Conference on Business Process Management was an indication of the vibrancy of the area and the varied...

Microsoft’s principal data access technology, ADO.NET Entity Framework, has had two major releases as part of the .NET Framework. NET 3.5 brought us the first version of Entity Framework, which is covered in the first edition of Programming Entity Framework. In 2010, Microsoft .NET 4 was released; it contained the next version of...

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...

PHP Master is aimed at intermediate PHP developers—those who have left their newbie status behind, and are looking to advance their skills and knowledge. Our aim as authors is to enable developers to refine their skills across a number of areas, and so we’ve picked topics that we felt have stood us in the best stead to grow...

PHP IS A POPULAR PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE that powers many websites. It originally started out as a way to make dynamic websites by generating HTML. Today it stands on its own as a generalpurpose programming language and is available on most web hosting sites. Because of its roots, it is very easy to insert bits and pieces of PHP inside of...

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) was carried out between 2001 and 2005 to assess the consequences of ecosystem change for human well-being and to establish the basis for actions needed to enhance the conservation and sustainable use of ecosystems and their contributions to human well-being. The MA was originally conceived as a...

This book represents thirteen papers that are based on the presentations made in the five session symposium on "Damage and Interfacial Debonding in Composites" on the occasion of the 32nd Society of Engineering Science Meeting; held in New Orleans, Louisiana, October 29 - November 1, 1995. The five sessions were mainly in the...

Electron Microscopy in Heterogeneous Catalysis describes the unique role electron microscopy plays in the immensely important field of heterogeneous catalysis. It brings together several disciplines, namely surface science, solid state chemistry and physics, materials science, chemical engineering and crystallography. The work described in...

This book was developed from a workshop on the “Effective Use of Ecological Modeling in Management,” held in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, on October 23–26, 2000. The workshop was sponsored by the Department of Defense’s (DoD’s) Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP), the Army Research...

The Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) has seen a huge uptake in both academia and industry over the past years. It is seen by many as the de facto standard for business process modeling and has become very popular with business analysts, tool vendors and end users. As of version 2.0, the BPMN contains a comprehensive set of...