Legal Protection of the Web Page as a Database

Nowadays the Web page is one of the most common medium used by people, institutions, and companies to promote themselves, to share knowledge, and to get through to every body in every part of the world. In spite of that, the Web page does not entitle one to a specific legal protection and because of this, every investment of time and money that stays off-stage is not protected by an unlawfully used. Seeing that no country in the world has a specific legislation on this issue in this chapter, we develop a theory that wants to give legal protection to Web pages using laws and treatment that are just present. In particular, we have developed a theory that considers Web pages as a database, so extends a database’s legal protection to Web pages. We start to analyze each component of a database and to find them in a Web page so that we can compare those juridical goods. After that, we analyze present legislation concerning databases and in particular, World Intellectual Property Organization Copyright Treatments and European Directive 96/92/CE, which we consider as the better legislation in this field. In the end, we line future trends that seem to appreciate and apply our theory.

Enhancing the Process of Knowledge Discovery in Geographic Databases Using Geo-Ontologies

This chapter introduces the problem of mining frequent geographic patterns and spatial association rules from geographic databases. In the geographic domain most discovered patterns are trivial, non-novel, and noninteresting, which simply represent natural geographic associations intrinsic to geographic data. A large amount of natural geographic associations are explicitly represented in geographic database schemas and geo-ontologies, which have not been used so far in frequent geographic pattern mining. Therefore, this chapter presents a novel approach to extract patterns from geographic databases using geoontologies as prior knowledge. The main goal of this chapter is to show how the large amount of knowledge represented in geo-ontologies can be used to avoid the extraction of patterns that are previously known as noninteresting.

From Databases to Ontologies

This chapter introduces the UML profile for OWL as an essential instrument for bridging the gap between the legacy relational databases and OWL ontologies. We address one of the long-standing relational database design problems where initial conceptual model (a semantically clear domain conceptualization ontology) gets “lost” during conversion into the normalized database schema. The problem is that such “loss” makes database inaccessible for direct query by domain experts familiar with the conceptual model only. This problem can be avoided by exporting the database into RDF according to the original conceptual model (OWL ontology) and formulating semantically clear queries in SPARQL over the RDF database. Through a detailed example we show how UML/OWL profile is facilitating this new and promising approach.

Integrating Projects from Multiple Open Source Code Forges

Much of the data about free, libre, and open source (FLOSS) software development comes from studies of code forges or code repositories used for managing projects. This paper presents a method for integrating data about open source projects by way of matching projects (entities) across multiple code forges. After a review of the relevant literature, a few of the methods are chosen and applied to the FLOSS domain, including a comparison of some simple scoring systems for pairwise project matches. Finally, the paper describes limitations of this approach and recommendations for future work.

A Roadmap on Updates

Updates, is a central issue in relational databases and knowledge databases. In the last years, it has been well studied in the non-monotonic reasoning paradigm. Several semantics for logic program updates have been proposed (Brewka, Dix, & Knonolige 1997), (De Schreye, Hermenegildo, & Pereira, 1999) (Katsumo & Mendelzon, 1991). However, recently a set of proposals has been characterized to propose mechanisms of updates based on logic and logic programming. All these mechanisms are built on semantics based on structural properties (Eiter, Fink, Sabattini & Thompits, 2000) (Leite, 2002) (Banti, Alferes & Brogi, 2003) (Zacarias, 2005). Furthermore, all these semantic ones coincide in considering the AGM proposal as the standard model in the update theory, for their wealth in properties. The AGM approach, introduced in (Alchourron, Gardenfors & Makinson, 1985) is the dominating paradigm in the area, but in the context of monotonic logic. All these proposals analyze and reinterpret the AGM postulates under the Answer Set Programming (ASP) such as (Eiter, Fink, Sabattini & Thompits, 2000). However, the majority of the adapted AGM and update postulates are violated by update programs, as shown in(De Schreye, Hermenegildo, & Pereira, 1999).

Compiling Medical Data into National Medical Databases

In recent years, various national medical databases have been set up in the EU from disparate local databases and file systems. Medical records contain personal data and are as such protected by EU and member states’ legislation. Medical data, in addition to being personal data, is also defined in the EU legislation as being especially sensitive and warrants special measures to protect it. It therefore follows that various legal issues and concerns arise in connection with these processes. Such issues relate to the merits of compiling a nationwide database, deciding on who has access to such a database, legitimate uses of medical data held, protection of medical data, and subject access rights amongst others. This chapter examines some of these issues and argues that such databases are inevitable due to technological change; however there are major legal and information security caveats that have to be addressed. Many of these caveats have not yet been resolved satisfactorily, hence making medical databases that already exist problematic.

Countermeasures for Protecting Legally Sensitive Web-Powered Databases and Web Portals

The issue of the escalation of security breaches in the field of Web systems has caused a great deal of disquiet in the computer security community. The majority of recorded security violations against legally sensitive portals have raised numerous issues both at an individual and at an organizational level. Furthermore, taking for granted the fact that security achieved through the isolation of the targeted systems is a path which no one is willing to follow, it is understood that security countermeasures must be perceived and applied without any alterations in respect of the current operational scheme. The economic and social reasons for using the Internet are still far too compelling (Schneier, 2005). Looking in this direction, the complexity as well as the urgency of the present situation has attracted specialists from other scientific sectors, such as psychology and law, who contribute to the search for an integrated multilevel solution required in this context.

A Deterministic Approach to XML Query Processing with Efficient Support for Pure and Negated Containments

This article reports the result of the author’s recent work on XML query processing/optimization, which is a very important issue in XML data management. In this work, in order to more effectively and efficiently handle XML queries involving pure and/or negated containments, a previously proposed deterministic optimization approach is largely adapted. This approach resorts to heuristic-based deterministic transformations on algebraic query expressions in order to achieve the best possible optimization efficiency. Specialized transformation rules are thus developed, and efficient implementation algorithms for pure and negated containments are presented as well. Experimental study confirms the validity and effectiveness of the presented approach and algorithms in processing of XML queries involving pure and/or negated containments.

Consistent Queries over Databases with Integrity Constraints

Integrating data from different sources consists of two main steps, the first in which the various relations are merged together, and the second in which some tuples are removed (or inserted) from the resulting database in order to satisfy integrity constraints. There are several ways to integrate databases or possibly distributed information sources, but whatever integration architecture we choose, the heterogeneity of the sources to be integrated causes subtle problems. In particular, the database obtained from the integration process may be inconsistent with respect to integrity constraints, that is, one or more integrity constraints are not satisfied. Integrity constraints represent an important source of information about the real world. They are usually used to define constraints on data (functional dependencies, inclusion dependencies, etc.) and have, nowadays, a wide applicability in several contexts such as semantic query optimization, cooperative query answering, database integration, and view update.

Approximate Range Querying over Sliding Windows

In the context of Knowledge Discovery in Databases, data reduction is a pre-processing step delivering succinct yet meaningful data to sequent stages. If the target of mining are data streams, then it is crucial to suitably reduce them, since often analyses on such data require multiple scans. In this chapter, we propose a histogram-based approach to reducing sliding windows supporting approximate arbitrary (i.e., non biased) range-sum queries. The histogram is based on a hierarchical structure (as opposed to the flat structure of traditional ones) and it results suitable to directly support hierarchical queries, such as drill-down and roll-up operations. In particular, both sliding window shifting and quick query answering operations are logarithmic in the sliding window size. Experimental analysis shows the superiority of our method in terms of accuracy w.r.t. the state-of-the-art approaches in the context of histogram-based sliding window reduction techniques.