Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications (FAIA)

Information Modelling and Knowledge Bases XXIV

With the growth in our reliance on information systems and computer science information modeling and knowledge bases have become a focus for academic attention and research. The amount and complexity of information, the number of levels of abstraction and the size of databases and knowledge bases all continue to increase, and new challenges and problems arise every day.

This book is part of the series Information Modelling and Knowledge Bases, which concentrates on a variety of themes such as the design and specification of information systems, software engineering and knowledge and process management. Attention is also paid to theoretical disciplines including cognitive science, artificial intelligence, logic, linguistics and analytical philosophy. Selected papers cover many areas of information modeling and knowledge bases, namely theory of concepts, database semantics, knowledge representation, software engineering, WWW information management, context-based information retrieval, ontological technology, image databases, temporal and spatial databases, document data management, process management, cultural modeling, social networks, personalization, interfaces, data mining and many others.

The book will be of interest to all those involved in research and application in these academic areas.

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Volume 251 Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications
Edited by: Vojtáš, P., Kiyoki, Y., Jaakkola, H., Tokuda, T., Yoshida, N.
January 2013, 376 pp., hardcover
ISBN: 978-1-61499-176-2
Price: US$189 / €130

Legal Knowledge and Information Systems
JURIX 2012: The Twenty-Fifth Annual Conference

The 25th edition of the JURIX conference was held in the Netherlands from the 17th till the 19th of December and was hosted by the University of Amsterdam. This year submissions came from 25 countries covering Europe, the Americas, Asia and Australia. These proceedings contain sixteen full and five short papers that were selected for presentation. As usual they cover a wide range of topics.

The majority of contributions deals with formal or computational models of legal argumentation and reasoning: questions of coherence, evidential reasoning, visualisation of argumentation and formal representations of legal narratives are amongst other issues addressed. Another group of papers is centred on representing the semantics of sources of law, to facilitate legislative drafting, information retrieval or “data protection by design”. A third group of papers goes beyond the more technical aspects of legal information systems and asks fundamental questions about the nature of legal expert systems or the concept of rights.

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Volume 250 Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications
Edited by: Schäfer, B.
December 2012, 196 pp., hardcover
ISBN: 978-1-61499-166-3
Price: US$160 / €110

Databases and Information Systems VII
Selected Papers from the Tenth International Baltic Conference, DB&IS 2012

Databases and information systems are the backbone of modern information technology and are crucial to the IT systems which support all aspects of our everyday life; from government, education and healthcare, to business processes and the storage of our personal photos and archives.

This book presents 27 of the best revised papers selected from the 43 papers accepted following stringent peer review for the 2012 International Baltic Biennial Conference on Databases and Information Systems (Baltic DB&IS 2012), held in Vilnius, Lithuania, in July 2012. The conference provided a forum for the exchange of scientific achievements between the research communities of the Baltic countries and the rest of the world in the area of databases and information systems, bringing together researchers, practitioners and Ph.D. students from many countries.

The subject areas covered at the conference included databases, data mining and optimization in IS, business modeling, cloud computing, IS engineering tools and techniques, as well as advanced E-learning environments and technologies. The book also includes presentations from two of the invited speakers at the conference: Exponential Growth of ICT: How Long Can It Last, by Prof. Arne Sølvberg and Variable Systems Model in Information Systems Development by Prof. Marite Kirikova.

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Volume 249 Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications
Edited by: Caplinskas, A., Dzemyda, G., Lupeikiene, A., Vasilecas, O.
January 2013, 400 pp., hardcover
ISBN: 978-1-61499-160-1
Price: US$189 / €130

Artificial Intelligence Research and Development
Proceedings of the 15th International Conference of the Catalan Association for Artificial Intelligence

One hundred years after the birth of Alan Turing, the great pioneer of computer science, artificial intelligence has become so much a part of everyday life that it is hard to imagine the world without it.

This book contains papers from the 15th International Conference of the Catalan Association of Artificial Intelligence (CCIA 2012), held at the Universitat d’Alicant, Spain, in October 2012. Since 1994 the Catalan Association of Artificial Intelligence (ACIA) has fostered cooperation between researchers in artificial intelligence within the Catalan speaking community. The annual CCIA is its international conference, a platform where not only researchers from Catalan speaking countries, but also those working in artificial intelligence worldwide, have found a place to show, discuss and publish the results of their researches and developments.

The 23 papers presented here, which include contributions from the AI community all over the world, cover topics such as KDD, DM and machine learning; natural language processing and recommenders; computer vision; robotics; AI for optimization problems and AI applications in the real world. The book also includes the contributions of the two invited keynote speakers at the conference - Oscar Cordón and Eduardo Nebot - which respectively address the subjects of real-world applications of soft artificial intelligence, and challenges of automation and safety in field robotics.

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Volume 248 Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications
Edited by: Riaño, D., Onaindia, E., Cazorla, M.
October 2012, 260 pp., hardcover
ISBN: 978-1-61499-138-0
Price: US$174 / €120

Human Language Technologies – The Baltic Perspective
Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference Baltic HLT 2012

Human language technologies continue to play an important part in the modern information society. This book contains papers presented at the fifth international conference ‘Human Language Technologies – The Baltic Perspective (Baltic HLT 2012)’, held in Tartu, Estonia, in October 2012.

Baltic HLT provides a special venue for new and ongoing work in computational linguistics and related disciplines, both in the Baltic states and in a broader geographical perspective. It brings together scientists, developers, providers and users of HLT, and is a forum for the sharing of new ideas and recent advances in human language processing, promoting cooperation between the research communities of computer science and linguistics from the Baltic countries and the rest of the world.

Twenty long papers, as well as the posters or demos accepted for presentation at the conference, are published here. They cover a wide range of topics: morphological disambiguation, dependency syntax and valency, computational semantics, named entities, dialogue modeling, terminology extraction and management, machine translation, corpus and parallel corpus compiling, speech modeling and multimodal communication. Some of the papers also give a general overview of the state of the art of human language technology and language resources in the Baltic states.

This book will be of interest to all those whose work involves the use and application of computational linguistics and related disciplines.

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Volume 247 Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications
Edited by: Tavast, A., Muischnek, K., Koit, M.
October 2012, 312 pp., hardcover
ISBN: 978-1-61499-132-8
Price: US$174 / €120

New Trends in Software Methodologies, Tools and Techniques
Proceedings of the Eleventh SoMeT_12

Software is the essential enabling means for science and the new economy. It helps us to create a more reliable, flexible and robust society. But software often falls short of our expectations. Current methodologies, tools, and techniques remain expensive and are not yet sufficiently reliable, while many promising approaches have proved to be no more than case-by-case oriented methods.

This book contains extensively reviewed papers from the eleventh International Conference on New Trends in software Methodology, Tools and Techniques (SoMeT_12), held in Genoa, Italy, in September 2012. The conference provides an opportunity for scholars from the international research community to discuss and share research experiences of new software methodologies and techniques, and the contributions presented here address issues ranging from research practices and techniques and methodologies to proposing and reporting solutions for global world business. The emphasis has been on human-centric software methodologies, end-user development techniques and emotional reasoning, for an optimally harmonized performance between the design tool and the user. Topics covered include the handling of cognitive issues in software development to adapt it to the user's mental state and intelligent software design in software utilizing new aspects on conceptual ontology and semantics reflected on knowledge base system models.

This book provides an opportunity for the software science community to show where we are today and where the future may take us.

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Volume 246 Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications
Edited by: Fujita, H., Revetria, R.
September 2012, 608 pp., hardcover
ISBN: 978-1-61499-124-3
Price: US$210 / €145

Advances in Knowledge-Based and Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems

In this 2012 edition of Advances in Knowledge-Based and Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems the latest innovations and advances in Intelligent Systems and related areas are presented by leading experts from all over the world. The 228 papers that are included cover a wide range of topics. One emphasis is on Information Processing, which has become a pervasive phenomenon in our civilization. While the majority of Information Processing is becoming intelligent in a very broad sense, major research in Semantics, Artificial Intelligence and Knowledge Engineering supports the domain specific applications that are becoming more and more present in our everyday living.

Ontologies play a major role in the development of Knowledge Engineering in various domains, from Semantic Web down to the design of specific Decision Support Systems. Research on Ontologies and their applications is a highly active front of current Computational Intelligence science that is addressed here.

Other subjects in this volume are modern Machine Learning, Lattice Computing and Mathematical Morphology. The wide scope and high quality of these contributions clearly show that knowledge engineering is a continuous living and evolving set of technologies aimed at improving the design and understanding of systems and their relations with humans.

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Volume 243 Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications
Edited by: Graña, M., Toro, C., Posada, J., Howlett, R.J., Jain, L.C.
September 2012, 2402 (part 1-3), softcover
ISBN: 978-1-61499-104-5
Price: US$348 / €240

Computational Models of Argument
Proceedings of COMMA 2012

The subject of argumentation has been studied since ancient times, but it has seen major innovations since the advent of the computer age. Software already exists which can create and evaluate arguments in high-stake situations, such as medical diagnosis and criminal investigation; formal systems can help us appreciate the role of the value judgments which underlie opposing positions; and it is even possible to enter into argumentative dialogues as if playing a computer game.

This book presents the 28 full papers, 17 short papers and a number of system demonstrations, described in an extended abstract, from the 2012 biennial Computational Models of Argument (COMMA) conference, held in Vienna, Austria. Papers by the invited speakers Professor Trevor Bench-Capon, Professor Erik Krabbe and Professor Keith Stenning are also included.

This year, for the first time, COMMA invited the submission of papers for an innovative applications track, and those which were accepted for presentation are included in this volume. Argumentation can be studied from many angles, including the artificial, natural and theoretical systems perspective. Presentations at the 2012 conference addressed the subject from these perspectives and many more.

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Volume 245 Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications
Edited by: Verheij, B., Szeider, S., Woltran, S.
September 2012, 536 pp., hardcover
ISBN: 978-1-61499-110-6
Price: US$210 / €145

Grounding Geographic Information in Perceptual Operations

Geographic information reflects ontological world views, just like any linguistic utterance. However, in comparison with spoken language, all kinds of digital information is affected by the problem of reference to an even larger extent, because of the loss of the context of speech. How can the phenomena underlying digital information be referred to in an inter-subjective way? The problem is not that machines cannot communicate, but that humans frequently misunderstand each other when communicating via machines.

This book puts forward a proposal about how semantic reference can be reproduced based on the operations necessary to generate a dataset. These include cognitive constructions as well as perceptual operations, i.e., operations of the human attentional apparatus. Perceptual operations allow one to share information by focusing human attention on ‘Gestalts’ in the perceived space around the body. Gestalt mechanisms allow observers to make predications, i.e., to relate foci of attention. The author proposes a kind of ‘practical constructivism’ guided by a formal language. The idea is to describe data ‘bottom-up’ in order to reconstruct the observation and abstraction process, instead of presuming abstract ontological concepts. This approach is demonstrated by reconstructing the concept of a road network, which underlies an important kind of geographic data.

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Volume 244 Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications
Edited by: Scheider, S.
August 2012, 212 pp., softcover
ISBN: 978-1-61499-106-9
Price: US$174 / €120