"This book documents high-quality research addressing ontological issues relevant to the modeling of enterprises and information systems in general, and business processes in particular covering both static and dynamic aspects of structural concepts. It provides reference content to researchers, practitioners, and scholars in the fields of language design, information systems, enterprise modeling, artificial intelligence, and the Semantic Web"--Provided by publisher.

An ontology is a description (like a formal specification of a program) of concepts and relationships that can exist for an agent or a community of agents. The concept is important for the purpose of enabling knowledge sharing and reuse. The Handbook on Ontologies provides a comprehensive overview of the current status and future prospectives of the field of ontologies. The handbook demonstrates standards that have been created recently, it surveys methods that have been developed and it shows how to bring both into practice of ontology infrastructures and applications that are the best of their kind.

An ontology is a formal description of concepts and relationships that can exist for a community of human and/or machine agents. The notion of ontologies is crucial for the purpose of enabling knowledge sharing and reuse. The Handbook on Ontologies provides a comprehensive overview of the current status and future prospectives of the field of ontologies considering ontology languages, ontology engineering methods, example ontologies, infrastructures and technologies for ontologies, and how to bring this all into ontology-based infrastructures and applications that are among the best of their kind. The field of ontologies has tremendously developed and grown in the five years since the first edition of the "Handbook on Ontologies". Therefore, its revision includes 21 completely new chapters as well as a major re-working of 15 chapters transferred to this second edition.

This book describes the state-of-the-art in ontology-driven information systems (ODIS) and gives a complete perspective on the problems, solutions and open research questions in this field. The book covers four broad areas: foundations of ODIS, ontological engineering, ODIS architectures, and ODIS applications. It will trigger innovative thought processes and open up significant new domains in ODIS research.

For the last decades, as the computer technology has been developing, the importance of human-computer systems interaction problems was growing. This is not only because the computer systems performance characteristics have been im-proved but also due to the growing number of computer users and of their expectations about general computer systems capabilities as universal tools for human work and life facilitation. The early technological problems of man-computer information exchange – which led to a progress in computer programming languages and input/output devices construction – have been step by step dominated by the more general ones of human interaction with-and-through computer systems, shortly denoted as H-CSI problems. The interest of scientists and of any sort specialists to the H-CSI problems is very high as it follows from an increasing number of scientific conferences and publications devoted to these topics. The present book contains selected papers concerning various aspects of H-CSI. They have been grouped into five Parts: I. General H-CSI problems (7 papers), II. Disabled persons helping and medical H-CSI applications (9 papers), III. Psychological and linguistic H-CSI aspects (9 papers), IV. Robots and training systems (8 papers), V. Various H-CSI applications (11 papers).

As businesses are continuously developing new services, procedures, and standards, electronic business has emerged into an important aspect of the science field by providing various applications through efficiently and rapidly processing information among business partners. Research and Development in E-Business through Service-Oriented Solutions highlights the main concepts of e-business as well as the advanced methods, technologies, and aspects that focus on technical support. This book is an essential reference source of professors, students, researchers, developers, and other industry experts in order to provide a vast amount of specialized knowledge sources for promoting e-business.