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Information systems are the backbone of many of today's computerized applications. Distributed databases and the infrastructure needed to support them have been well studied. However, this book is the first to address distributed database interoperability by examining the successes and failures, various approaches, infrastructures, and trends of the field. A gap exists in the way that these systems have been investigated by real practitioners. This gap is more pronounced than usual, partly because of the way businesses operate, the systems they have, and the difficulties created by systems'autonomy and heterogeneity. Telecommunications firms, for example, must deal with an increased demand for automation while at the same time continuing to function at their current level. While academics are focusing on investigating differences between distributed databases, federated databases, heterogeneous databases, and, more generally, among loosely connected and tightly coupled systems, those who have to deal with real problems right away know that the only relevant research is the one that will ensure that their system works to produce reasonably correct results. Interconnecting Heterogeneous Information Systems covers the underlying principles and infrastructures needed to realize truly global information systems. The book discusses technologies related to middleware, the Web, workflows, transactions, and data warehousing. It also overviews architectures with a discussion of critical issues. The book gives an overview of systems that can be viewed as learning platforms. While these systems do not translate to successful commercial realities, they push the envelope in terms of research. Successful commercial systems have benefited from the experiments conducted in these prototypes. The book includes two case studies based on the authors'own work. Interconnecting Heterogeneous Information Systems issuitable as a textbook for a graduate-level course on Interconnecting Heterogeneous Information Systems, as well as a secondary text for a graduate-level course on database or information systems, and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in industry.

Advances In Digital Government presents a collection of in-depth articles that addresses a representative cross-section of the matrix of issues involved in implementing digital government systems. These articles constitute a survey of both the technical and policy dimensions related to the design, planning and deployment of digital government systems. The research and development projects within the technical dimension represent a wide range of governmental functions, including the provisioning of health and human services, management of energy information, multi-agency integration, and criminal justice applications. The technical issues dealt with in these projects include database and ontology integration, distributed architectures, scalability, and security and privacy. The human factors research emphasizes compliance with access standards for the disabled and the policy articles contain both conceptual models for developing digital government systems as well as real management experiences and results in deploying them. Advances In Digital Government presents digital government issues from the perspectives of different communities and societies. This geographic and social diversity illuminates a unique array of policy and social perspectives, exposing practitioners to new and useful ways of thinking about digital government.

Great advances have been made in the database field. Relational and object- oriented databases, distributed and client/server databases, and large-scale data warehousing are among the more notable. However, none of these advances promises to have as great and direct an effect on the daily lives of ordinary citizens as video databases. Video databases will provide a quantum jump in our ability to deal with visual data, and in allowing people to access and manipulate visual information in ways hitherto thought impossible. Video Database Systems: Issues, Products and Applications gives practical information on academic research issues, commercial products that have already been developed, and the applications of the future driving this research and development. This book can also be considered a reference text for those entering the field of video or multimedia databases, as well as a reference for practitioners who want to identify the kinds of products needed in order to utilize video databases. Video Database Systems: Issues, Products and Applications covers concepts, products and applications. It is written at a level which is less detailed than that normally found in textbooks but more in-depth than that normally written in trade press or professional reference books. Thus, it seeks to serve both an academic and industrial audience by providing a single source of information about the research issues in the field, and the state-of-the-art of practice.