Ontologies for Urban Development
Action C21 of the European programme for Cooperation in the field of Scientific and Technical Research (COST—http://www.cost.esf.org/) is dedicated to investigating urban ontologies for an improved communication in urban civil engineering projects. The Action, known informally as "Towntology", brings together a large and heterogeneous grouping from across Europe, whose interests range from construction to urban tourism and from transport infrastructure to resource visualisation. On 6-7 November 2006, in Geneva, the Action convened a successful workshop to address emerging issues in the field. This volume presents the contributions to that workshop, in many cases revised afterwards to capture some of the outcomes of discussion.
Oncologic and Cardiologic PET/CT-Diagnosis : An Interdisciplinary Atlas and Manual
Since 1999/2000 simultaneous imaging of anatomical features and metabolic activities using fused PET and CT images has complemented and in many cases even replaced what was originally done as separate analysis. – Is this a small revolution? – In fact, this new approach can be considered to be without a rival for imaging diagnosis. The complementary efforts of nuclear medicine physicians and radiologists have improved the diagnostic value of PET/CT scans. The successful use of PET/CT in the field of oncology has been documented world-wide, and in cardiology we can take advantage of the significant findings of PET diagnosis, particularly in the USA. New prospects are now available for paediatric oncology and molecular medicine.
On the Uniqueness of Humankind
Europäische Akademie organized the conference "The Uniqueness of Humankind – Über die Sonderstellung des Menschen". The proceedings of the conference documented in this volume approached the theoretical and practical concept of the "Sonderstellung" against the background of present day knowledge in biosciences.
On the path to AI : Law’s prophecies and the conceptual foundations of the machine learning age
This book explores machine learning and its impact on how we make sense of the world. It does so by bringing together two ‘revolutions’ in a surprising analogy: the revolution of machine learning, which has placed computing on the path to artificial intelligence, and the revolution in thinking about the law that was spurred by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr in the last two decades of the 19th century.
On the move to meaningful internet systems : OTM 2008 Workshops ; OTM Confederated International Workshops and Posters, ADI, AWeSoMe, COMBEK, EI2N, IWSSA, MONET, OnToContent + QSI, ORM, PerSys, RDDS, SEMELS, and SWWS 2008, Monterrey, Mexico, November 9-14, 2008. Proceedings
This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of 13 international workshops held as part of OTM 2008 in Monterrey, Mexico, in November 2008.The 106 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 171 submissions to the workshops. The volume starts with 19 additional revised poster papers of the OTM 2008 main conferences CoopIS and ODBASE. Topics of the workshop papers are ambient data integration (ADI 2008), agents and web services merging in distributed environment (AWeSoMe 2008), community-based evolution of knowledge-intensive systems (COMBEK 2008), enterprise integration, interoperability and networking (EI2N 2008), system/software architectures .
On Line Citizenship : Emerging Technologies for European Cities
The book presents e-government issues from an institutional as well as a practical point of view through the contributions of distinguished authors representative of the European Union, the European network of cities (Telecities) and the Italian Government. On Line Citizenship offers an innovative approach in the analysis of technology's evolutionary paths in e-government through a comparison with e-business trends.
Omics sudies of medicinal plants
Herbal drugs play a pivotal role in modern medicine and pharmaceutical care; however, only limited biotechnology applications have been seen in medicinal plants. Revolutions in high-throughput approaches emphasize omics approaches, such as genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics. A volume in the Exploring Medicinal Plants series, this book provides a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of breakthroughs in high-throughput approaches for the research of medicinal plants.
Nutrient Acquisition by Plants : An Ecological Perspective
Adaptation and evolution of terrestrial plants depend, to a large extent, on their ability to acquire nutrients. This is a modern and integrative treatment of the mechanisms controlling plant nutrient uptake and how plants respond to changes in the environment. The following key topics are covered: soil nutrient bioavailability; root responses to variations in nutrient supply; nitrogen fixation; regulation of nutrient uptake by internal plant demand; root characteristics; kinetics of nutrient uptake; root architecture; life span; mycorrhizae; responses to climate change. This integrated view helps us to understand the mechanisms that govern present-day plant communities and is indispensable in models designed to predict the response of plants to a changing climate.
Numerical Methods for Nonsmooth Dynamical Systems : Applications in Mechanics and Electronics
This book concerns the numerical simulation of dynamical systems whose trajectories may not be differentiable everywhere. They are named nonsmooth dynamical systems. They make an important class of systems, firstly because of the many applications in which nonsmooth models are useful, secondly because they give rise to new problems in various fields of science. Usually nonsmooth dynamical systems are represented as differential inclusions, complementarity systems, evolution variational inequalities, each of these classes being itself split into several subclasses.
Nucleic Acids Hybridization : Modern Applications
Several approaches, such as microarray hybridization, have become extremely popular tools for specialists in biochemistry and biomedicine, while the potential of many other advantageous techniques seems to be underestimated. Written by an international team of authors, this book details the current state-of-art in hybridization techniques. Coverage includes experimental protocols along with comprehensive and detailed method descriptions.
Novel Biotechnologies for Biocontrol Agent Enhancement and Management
This multidisciplinary group, having backgrounds in the diff- ent aspects of biotechnologies (transgenic enhancement, molecular biology, formulation, genetics, risk assessment, new technology, biochemistry, and physiology), presented highly advanced lectures during the 10-day-ASI, in order to allow students to improve their capability to enhance and manage - ological control agents. This approach will allow ASI attendees to bring new ideas, new approaches, or new methodologies coming from different ?elds of application to their own ?eld of expertise.
Northeast Asia : Ripe for Integration?
Can regional mechanisms better institutionalize the increasing complexity of economic and security ties among the countries in Northeast Asia? As the international state system undergoes dramatic changes in both security and economic relations in the wake of the end of the Cold War, the Asian financial crisis, and the attack of 9/11, this question is now at the forefront of the minds of both academics and policymakers. Still, little research has been done to integrate the analysis of security and economic analysis of changes in the region within a broader context that will give us theoretically-informed policy insights. Against this backdrop, this book investigates the origins and evolution of Northeast Asia's new institutional architecture in trade, finance, and security from both a theoretical and empirical perspective.
Nordic Mediation Research
Presents twelve unique studies on mediation from researchers in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, respectively. Each study highlights important aspects of mediation, including the role of children in family mediation, the evolution and ambivalent application of restorative justice in the Nordic countries, the confusion of roles in court-connected mediation, and the challenges in dispute systems.
Nonlinear Partial Differential Equations with Applications
This book primarily concerns quasilinear and semilinear elliptic and parabolic partial differential equations, inequalities, and systems. It balances the abstract functional-analysis approach based on nonlinear monotone, pseudomonotone, weakly continuous, or accretive mappings with concrete partial differential equations in their weak (or more general) formulation. Methods of Galerkin or of Rothe are exposed in a large generality. Other methods include various direct methods, regularization, or fixed points. The exposition leads general theory as fast as possible towards the analysis of concrete equations, which have specific applications in continuum (thermo-) mechanics of solids and fluids, electrically (semi-) conductive media, modelling of biological systems, or in mechanical engineering. Selected parts are rather an introduction into the subject while some others form an advanced textbook. The intended audience is graduate and PhD students and researchers in the theory of partial differential equations or in mathematical modelling of distributed parameter systems.
Nonlinear Parabolic-Hyperbolic Coupled Systems and Their Attractors
This book presents recent results concerning the global existence in time, the large-time behaviour, decays of solutions and the existence of global attractors for some nonlinear parabolic-hyperbolic coupled systems of evolutionary partial differential equations arising from physics, mechanics and material science, such as the compressible Navier-Stokes equations, thermo(visco)elastic systems and elastic systems. To keep the book as self-contained as possible, the first chapter introduces to the needed results and tools from functional analysis, Sobolev spaces, differential and integral inequa.
Nonlinear Elliptic and Parabolic Problems : A Special Tribute to the Work of Herbert Amann
The present volume is dedicated to celebrate the work of the renowned mathematician Herbert Amann, who had a significant and decisive influence in shaping Nonlinear Analysis. Most articles published in this book, which consists of 32 articles in total, written by highly distinguished researchers, are in one way or another related to the scientific works of Herbert Amann. The contributions cover a wide range of nonlinear elliptic and parabolic equations with applications to natural sciences and engineering. Special topics are fluid dynamics, reaction-diffusion systems, bifurcation theory, maximal regularity, evolution equations, and the theory of function spaces.
Nonlinear Dynamics and Heterogeneous Interacting Agents
Economic application of nonlinear dynamics, microscopic agent-based modelling, and the use of artificial intelligence techniques as learning devices of boundedly rational actors are among the most exciting interdisciplinary ventures of economic theory over the past decade. This volume provides us with a most fascinating series of examples on "complexity in action" exemplifying the scope and explanatory power of these innovative approaches.
Non-equilibrium Thermodynamics and the Production of Entropy: Life, Earth, and Beyond
The present volume studies the application of concepts from non-equilibrium thermodynamics to a variety of research topics. Emphasis is on the Maximum Entropy Production (MEP) principle and applications to Geosphere-Biosphere couplings. Written by leading researchers form a wide range of background, the book proposed to give a first coherent account of an emerging field at the interface of thermodynamics, geophysics and life sciences.
Nitrogen-fixing Leguminous Symbioses
This book is the self-contained final volume of a comprehensive seven-volume series covering the basic and applied science relating to nitrogen fixation. It addresses the most important nitrogen-fixing symbiosis of all – that between legumes and their root-nodule bacteria – and therefore deals with the properties and behaviour of both macro- and micro-symbiont.
Nitrogen-fixing Actinorhizal Symbioses
This book is the self-contained sixth volume of a comprehensive series on nitrogen fixation. It presents the state-of-the-art in regards to actinorhizal symbioses. Like legumes, actinorhizal plants form root nodules that host nitrogen-fixing soil bacteria. However, because the macrosymbionts are, with one exception, woody plants rather than crop plants, actinorhizal symbioses are less well-known than legume symbioses to which they are phylogenetically related. Actinorhizal plants come from eight different families. This volume includes chapters that deal with all these aspects of the symbiosis and both symbionts plus their ecological role and use. Other chapters tackle the global distribution of different actinorhizal plants and their microsymbionts and how this impacts the question of co-evolution of the micro- and macrosymbionts as well as comparing the actinorhizal and leguminous symbioses.



















