Version control is a widely used practice among software developers. It reduces the risk of changing their software and allows them to manage different configurations and to collaborate with others more efficiently. This is amplified by code sharing platforms such as GitHub or Bitbucket. Most version control systems track files (e.g., Git, Mercurial, and Subversion do), but some programming environments do not operate on files, but on objects instead (many Smalltalk implementations do). Users of such environments want to use version control for their objects anyway. Specialized version control systems, such as the ones available for Smalltalk systems (e.g., ENVY/Developer and Monticello), focus on a small subset of objects that can be versioned. Most of these systems concentrate on the tracking of methods, classes, and configurations of these. Other user-defined and user-built objects are either not eligible for version control at all, tracking them involves complicated workarounds, or a fixed, domain-unspecific serialization format is used that does not equally suit all kinds of objects. Moreover, these version control systems that are specific to a programming environment require their own code sharing platforms;popular, well-established platforms for file-based version control systems cannot be used or adapter solutions need to be implemented and maintained. To improve the situation for version control of arbitrary objects, a framework for tracking, converting, and storing of objects is presented in this report. It allows editions of objects to be stored in an exchangeable, existing backend version control system. The platforms of the backend version control system can thus be reused. Users and objects have control over how objects are captured for the purpose of version control. Domain-specific requirements can be implemented. The storage format (i.e. the file format, when file-based backend version control systems are used) can also vary from one object to another. Different editions of objects can be compared and sets of changes can be applied to graphs of objects. A generic way for capturing and restoring that supports most kinds of objects is described. It models each object as a collection of slots. Thus, users can begin to track their objects without first having to implement version control supplements for their own kinds of objects. The proposed architecture is evaluated using a prototype implementation that can be used to track objects in Squeak/Smalltalk with Git. The prototype improves the suboptimal standing of user objects with respect to version control described above and also simplifies some version control tasks for classes and methods as well. It also raises new problems, which are discussed in this report as well.

The contributed chapters to this volume provide a broad coverage of the areas of research in current parallel computing: architectures, languages and tools, graphics and fault tolerance. Additionally, the Inmos approach to building an asynchronous transfer mode system and the University of Twente method for designing system-level embedded controllers are featured in this work.

This comprehensive collection is a survey of research in object-oriented databases, offering a substantive overview of the field, section introductions, and over 40 research papers presented in their original scope and detail. The balanced selection of articles presents a confluence of ideas from both the language and database research communities that have contributed to the object-oriented paradigm. The editors develop a general definition and model for object-oriented databases and relate significant research efforts to this framework. Further, the collection explores the fundamental notions behind object-oriented databases, semantic data models, implementation of object-oriented systems, transaction processing, interfaces, and related approaches. Research and theory are balanced by applications to CAD systems, programming environments, and office information systems.

This volume represents a valuable collective contribution to the research and development of database systems. It contains papers in a variety of topics such as data models, distributed databases, multimedia databases, concurrency control, hypermedia and document processing, user interface, query processing and database applications.

The goal of the volume is twofold: to help engineers to understand the design and development process and the specific techniques utilized for constructing expert systems in engineering and, secondly, to introduce computer specialists to significant applications of knowledge-based techniques in engineering. Among the authors are world famous experts of engineering and knowledge-based systems development.

The past 20 years can be regarded as the adolescence of geographic information science (GIS), as it grew from a burgeoning area of study into a mature and thriving field. During those two decades, the International Journal of Geographic Information Science (formerly Systems) (IJGIS) was one of the most prominent academic guiding forces in GIScience