This volume was primarily intended to present selected papers from the workshop on Theory and Applications of Nested Relations and Complex Objects, held in Darmstadt, FRG, from April 6-8, 1987. Other papers were solicited in order to provide a picture of the field as general as possible. Research on nested relations and complex objects originates in the late seventies. The motivation was to obtain data models and systems which would provide support for so-called complex objects or molecular structures, i.e., for hierarchically organized data, thereby overcoming severe shortcomings of the relational model. This theme of research is now maturing. Systems based on those ideas are beginning to be available. Languages of various natures (algebras, calculi, graphical, logic-oriented) have been designed and a theory is slowly emerging. Finally, new developments in database technology and research are incorporating features of models involving complex objects. A variety of approaches is represented in this volume. The first three papers give overviews of major pioneering implementation efforts. The fourth paper is devoted to the important issue of implementation of storage structures. The next three papers propose excursions in the foundations of nested relations and complex objects. The following six contributions are all devoted to modeling of complex objects. The area of database design is represented by the last four papers.

Increasingly, formal specification is being used by database researchers to describe and understand the systems they are designing and implementing. Similarly, those working on formal specification techniques have recognised that the database field provides a rich context for developing their ideas. However, as experts in one field often have a relatively limited knowledge of the other, there is a growing need for discussion about the relationship between these two fields and how they can be usefully combined. This volume contains the 16 papers which were presented at the International Workshop on Specification on Database Systems, held in Glasgow, 3-5 July 1991. The purpose of the workshop was to bring together these fields and to examine, through a series of invited talks, presentations and working groups, the role that formal specification can play in developing database systems. The papers describe current research into topics such as the formal specification of data models, query languages and transaction handling and the use of formal specification techniques to understand problems which arise in database systems. The working groups, which are summarised at the end of the volume, covered a variety of issues including the role of graphical notations in database specification, the use of specification techniques in enabling "open" or extensible database systems and the education of the database community in specification techniques. This volume will be invaluable to the increasing number of researchers who are using both database systems and formal specification techniques in their work, and who wish to gain a more detailed knowledge of these two fields and the issues which affect them.

Currently, the field of information systems technology is rapidly extending into several dimensions. There is the semantic dimension (including object orientation, data deduction and extended knowledge representation schemes), there is improved systems integration, and there are new tools. All these extensions aim to provide semantically richer and better engineered information systems that allow for more adequate and complete representations and thus extend the effective use of database technology to a wider class of applications. Database researchers and developers, whether they are committed to application or to system construction, are convinced that next-generation information system technology will be heavily determined by a handful of new concepts that they have to understand and work out in detail now. This volume concentrates on the following topics: - Extended data types and data models, database programming languages; - Rule-based data deduction, expert systems, knowledge bases; - Object orientation and semantic data modelling; - DB application development, methodologies and tools; - Interface technology, parallelism, interoperability, ...; - New database applications.

Advanced information technology is pervasive in any kind of human activity - science, business, finance, management and others - and this is particularly true for database systems. Both database theory and database applications constitute a very important part of the state of the art of computer science. Meanwhile there is some discrepancy between different aspects of database activity. Theoreticians are sometimes not much aware of the real needs of business and industry; software specialists not always have the time or the apportunity to get acquainted with the most recent theoretical ideas and trends, as well as with advanced prototypes arising from these ideas; potential users often do not have the possibility of evaluating the theoretical foundations and the potential practical impact of different commercial products. So the main goal of the course was to put together people involved in different aspects of database activity and to promote active exchange of ideas among them.

Database and Data Communication Network Systems examines the utilization of the Internet and Local Area/Wide Area Networks in all areas of human endeavor. This three-volume set covers, among other topics, database systems, data compression, database architecture, data acquisition, asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) and the practical application of these technologies. The international collection of contributors was culled from exhaustive research of over 100,000 related archival and technical journals. This reference will be indispensable to engineering and computer science libraries, research libraries, and telecommunications, networking, and computer companies. It covers a diverse array of topics, including: * Techniques in emerging database system architectures * Techniques and applications in data mining * Object-oriented database systems * Data acquisition on the WWW during heavy client/server traffic periods * Information exploration on the WWW * Education and training in multimedia database systems * Data structure techniques in rapid prototyping and manufacturing * Wireless ATM in data networks for mobile systems * Applications in corporate finance * Scientific data visualization * Data compression and information retrieval * Techniques in medical systems, intensive care units

Physics students who want to become familiar with advanced computational strategies in classical and quantum dynamics will find here a detailed treatment many worked examples. This new edition has been revised and enlarged with chapters on the action principle in classical electrodynamics, on the functional derivative approach, and on computing traces.

This volume constitutes the proceedings of the First International Symposiumorganized by the Japan Society for Software Science and Technology. The symposium was held in Kanazawa, Japan, November 4-6, 1993 and attracted many researchers from academia and industry as well as ambitioned practitioners. Object technologies, in particular object-oriented programming, object-oriented databases, and software object bases, currently attract much attention and hold a great promise of future research and development in diverse areas of advanced software. The volume contains besides 6 invited presentations by renown researchers and 25 contributed papers carefully selected by an internationalprogram committee from a total of 92 submissions.