Russia has recently re-emerged as the dominant political, economic and military actor in former Soviet nations. Kanet and Freire bring together a stellar cast of contributors to consider Russia's recent return as a major regional and international actor and its likely future policy toward its neighbours.

A novel, first published in 1956.

Explores the way spatial database management systems aim at supporting queries that involve the space characteristics of the underlying data. This book discusses query processing techniques for nearest neighbor queries. It provides both basic concepts and results in spatial databases and parallel processing research.

Neighbours are a lively topic of everyday conversation and interest. Neighbours Around the World takes a comparative look around the world at our relationships and interactions with the people living next door, analysing the ways in which these relationships are changing in the face of large-scale macro social and urban processes.

The 11 papers are from two workshops: one in 1995-95 on dictionaries and priority queues, and the other in 1998-99 on near neighbor searches, the fifth and sixth DIMACS Algorithm Implementation Challenges initiated in 1991. They address those challenges with considerations of a practical perfect hashing algorithm, locally lifting the curse of dimensionality for a nearest neighbor search, and other topics. They also discuss methodology for the experimental analysis of algorithms. They are not indexed. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Modern applications are both data and computationally intensive and require the storage and manipulation of voluminous traditional (alphanumeric) and nontraditional data sets (images, text, geometric objects, time-series). Examples of such emerging application domains are: Geographical Information Systems (GIS), Multimedia Information Systems, CAD/CAM, Time-Series Analysis, Medical Information Sstems, On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP), and Data Mining. These applications pose diverse requirements with respect to the information and the operations that need to be supported. From the database perspective, new techniques and tools therefore need to be developed towards increased processing efficiency. This monograph explores the way spatial database management systems aim at supporting queries that involve the space characteristics of the underlying data, and discusses query processing techniques for nearest neighbor queries. It provides both basic concepts and state-of-the-art results in spatial databases and parallel processing research, and studies numerous applications of nearest neighbor queries.