Alexandros Nanopoulos

Space support in databases poses new challenges in every part of a database management system & the capability of spatial support in the physical layer is considered very important. This has led to the design of spatial access methods to enable the effective & efficient management of spatial objects. R-trees have a simplicity of structure & together with their resemblance to the B-tree, allow developers to incorporate them easily into existing database management systems for the support of spatial query processing. This book provides an extensive survey of the R-tree evolution, studying the applicability of the structure & its variations to efficient query processing, accurate proposed cost models, & implementation issues like concurrency control and parallelism. Written for database researchers, designers & programmers as well as graduate students, this comprehensive monograph will be a welcome addition to the field.

Advanced Signature Indexing for Multimedia and Web Applications presents the latest research developments in signature-based indexing and query processing, specifically in multimedia and Web domains. These domains now demand a different designation of hashing information in bit-strings (i.e., signatures), and new indexes and query processing methods. The book provides solutions to these issues and addresses the resulting requirements, which are not adequately handled by existing approaches. Examples of these applications include: searching for similar images, representing multi-theme layers in maps, recommending products to Web-clients, and indexing large Web-log files. Special emphasis is given to structure description, implementation techniques and clear evaluation of operations performed (from a performance perspective). Advanced Signature Indexing for Multimedia and Web Applications is an excellent reference for professionals involved in the development of applications in multimedia databases or the Web and may also serve as a textbook for advanced level courses in database and information retrieval systems.

Social Tagging Systems are web applications in which users upload resources (e.g., bookmarks, videos, photos, etc.) and annotate it with a list of freely chosen keywords called tags. This is a grassroots approach to organize a site and help users to find the resources they are interested in. Social tagging systems are open and inherently social; features that have been proven to encourage participation. However, with the large popularity of these systems and the increasing amount of user-contributed content, information overload rapidly becomes an issue. Recommender Systems are well known applications for increasing the level of relevant content over the “noise” that continuously grows as more and more content becomes available online. In social tagging systems, however, we face new challenges. While in classic recommender systems the mode of recommendation is basically the resource, in social tagging systems there are three possible modes of recommendation: users, resources, or tags. Therefore suitable methods that properly exploit the different dimensions of social tagging systems data are needed. In this book, we survey the most recent and state-of-the-art work about a whole new generation of recommender systems built to serve social tagging systems. The book is divided into self-contained chapters covering the background material on social tagging systems and recommender systems to the more advanced techniques like the ones based on tensor factorization and graph-based models.

Space support in databases poses new challenges in every part of a database management system & the capability of spatial support in the physical layer is considered very important. This has led to the design of spatial access methods to enable the effective & efficient management of spatial objects. R-trees have a simplicity of structure & together with their resemblance to the B-tree, allow developers to incorporate them easily into existing database management systems for the support of spatial query processing. This book provides an extensive survey of the R-tree evolution, studying the applicability of the structure & its variations to efficient query processing, accurate proposed cost models, & implementation issues like concurrency control and parallelism. Written for database researchers, designers & programmers as well as graduate students, this comprehensive monograph will be a welcome addition to the field.

Advanced Signature Indexing for Multimedia and Web Applications presents the latest research developments in signature-based indexing and query processing, specifically in multimedia and Web domains. These domains now demand a different designation of hashing information in bit-strings (i.e., signatures), and new indexes and query processing methods. The book provides solutions to these issues and addresses the resulting requirements, which are not adequately handled by existing approaches. Examples of these applications include: searching for similar images, representing multi-theme layers in maps, recommending products to Web-clients, and indexing large Web-log files. Special emphasis is given to structure description, implementation techniques and clear evaluation of operations performed (from a performance perspective). Advanced Signature Indexing for Multimedia and Web Applications is an excellent reference for professionals involved in the development of applications in multimedia databases or the Web and may also serve as a textbook for advanced level courses in database and information retrieval systems.