MPEG-7 constitutes a promising standard for the description of multimedia content. It can be expected that a lot of applications based on MPEG-7 media descriptions will be set up in the near future. Therefore, means for the adequate management of large amounts of MPEG-7-compliant media descriptions are certainly desirable. Essentially,

In this work we investigate the use of a new concept in component communication during the coordination of Web Services, expressed by the channel based coordinating communication system called Reo. The role of Reo is to construct and manage connectors, the latter being patterns of connected channel communicators. The communication and coordination of components lying over a distributed address space has been dealt so far with stream or datagram connections created and controlled by the participating calculation and coordination components. Web Services can take advantage of the Reo channel system that separates communication from computation concerns using components that have independent sink and source ports that can be attached to Web Services components, thus overcoming the problem of compatibility in distributed systems. The flow of information is entirely regulated by the channel interconnections. 1.

In a data warehousing process, the data preparation phase is crucial. Mastering this phase allows substantial gains in terms of time and performance when performing a multidimensional analysis or using data mining algorithms. Furthermore, a data warehouse can require external data. The web is a prevalent data source in this context, but the data broadcasted on this medium are very heterogeneous. We propose in this paper a UML conceptual model for a complex object representing a superclass of any useful data source (databases, plain texts, HTML and XML documents, images, sounds, video clips...). The translation into a logical model is achieved with XML, which helps integrating all these diverse, heterogeneous data into a unied format, and whose schema denition provides rst-rate metadata in our data warehousing context. Moreover, we benet from XML's exibility, extensibility and from the richness of the semistructured data model, but we are still able to later map XML documents into a database if more structuring is needed. Keywords: Multiform data, Data warehousing, Integration, Modeling 1

MPEG-7 is a very promising standard for the description of multimedia content. Cer-tainly, means for the adequate management of large amounts of MPEG-7 media descrip-tions are needed in the near future. Essentially, MPEG-7 media descriptions are XML documents following media description schemes defined with an extension of XML Schema named MPEG-7 DDL. However, XML database solutions available today are not suitable for the management of MPEG-7 media descriptions. They typically neglect the type in-formation available with media description schemes and represent the basic contents of media descriptions as text. But storing non-textual multimedia data typically contained in media descriptions such as melody contours and object shapes textually and forcing ap-plications to access and process such data as text is neither adequate nor efficient. In this paper, we therefore propose the Typed Document Object Model (TDOM), a data model for XML documents that can benefit from available schema definitions and represent the basic contents of a document in a typed fashion. Through these typed representations, applications can access and work with multimedia data contained in MPEG-7 media de-scriptions in way that is appropriate to the particular type of the data. Thereby, TDOM constitutes a solid foundation for an XML database solution enabling the adequate man-agement of MPEG-7 media descriptions. 1 1

MPEG-7 constitutes a promising standard for the description of multimedia content. It can be expected that a lot of applications based on MPEG-7 media descriptions will be set up in the near future. Therefore, means for the adequate management of large amounts of MPEG-7-compliant media descriptions are certainly desirable. Essentially, MPEG-7 media descriptions are XML documents following media description schemes defined with a variant of XML Schema. Thus, it is reasonable to investigate current database solutions for XML documents regarding their suitability for the management of these descriptions. In this paper, we motivate and present critical requirements for the management of MPEG-7 media descriptions and the resulting consequences for XML database solutions. Along these requirements, we discuss current state-of-the-art database solutions for XML documents. The analysis and comparison unveil the limitations of current database solutions with respect to the management of MPEG-7 media descriptions and point the way to the need for new solutions adequate to MPEG-7. 1

A broad spectrum of tourism information is already distributed over various web sites. However, a major problem for the tourist is to find these web sites and to deal with the differences concerning information presentation and information access. At the same time, it is not feasible to store every kind of information a tourist might be interested in at one web site neither in terms of storage costs nor and even more important in terms of maintenance overhead.

Data interoperability between computer systems is a critical goal for businesses. This thesis attempts to address data interoperability by proposing a design in which data producers produce an Abstract Data Interface to expose data. The interface allows data consumers to determine semantic matches, after which data producers and consumers can provide input to an Interface Generator that resolves the schematic differences. The result of the Interface Generator is an Interface that enables unfettered, interoperable data exchange between a data producer-data consumer pair.