This volume consists of the proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Formal Modelling and Analysis of Timed Systems (FORMATS 2008). The main goal of this series of conferences is to bring together diverse communities of researchers that deal with the timing aspects of computing systems. Both fundamental and practical aspects of timed systems are addressed. Further, three  invited talks that survey various aspects of this broad research domain were presented at the conference: “Composing Web Services in an Open World: QoS Issues” (Albert Benveniste); “Recent Results in Metric Temporal Logic” (Jo¨el Ouaknine); “Comparing the Expressiveness of Timed Automata and Timed Extensions of Petri Nets” (Jiri Srba).

FORMATS 2008 was co-located with QEST 2008 (Fifth International Conference on the Quantitative Evaluation of SysTems) and took place in Saint-Malo, France, during September 14–17, 2008. Detailed information about FORMATS 2008 can be found at http://formats08.inria.fr/, while, the generic link for the QEST conference series is http://www.qest.org. This was a great opportunity for researchers of both communities to share their scientific interests in timed systems.

This year we received 37 submissions and the Programme Committee selected 17 submissions for presentation at the conference. FORMATS 2008 used the EasyChair conference system to manage the reviewing process. The topics dealt with by the accepted papers cover: the theory of timed and hybrid systems, analysis and verification techniques and case studies. We wish to thank the Programme Committee members and the other reviewers for their competent and timely review of the submissions. We also wish to sincerely thank the three invited speakers, Albert Benveniste, Jo¨el Ouaknine, and Jiri Srba, for accepting our invitation and providing extended abstracts of their talks to be included in the proceedings. As always, the Springer LNCS team provided excellent support in the preparation of this volume.

This volume contains the best papers presented at the 12th East-European Conference on Advances in Databases and Information Systems (ADBIS 2008) held during September 5–9, 2008, in Pori, Finland. The series of ADBIS conferences is the successor of the annual international workshops with the same title that during 1993-1996 were organized in Russia by the Moscow ACM SIGMOD Chapter. ADBIS 2008 continues the series of ADBIS conferences held in St. Petersburg, Russia (1997), Poznan, Poland (1998), Maribor, Slovenia (1999), Prague, Czech Republic (2000), Vilnius, Lithuania (2001), Bratislava, Slovakia (2002), Dresden, Germany (2003), Budapest, Hungary (2004), Tallinn, Estonia (2005), Thessaloniki, Greece (2006), and Varna, Bulgaria (2007). The conferences are initiated and supervised by an international Steering Committee chaired by professor Leonid Kalinichenko.

The ADBIS conferences established an outstanding reputation as a scientific event of high quality serving as an internationally highly visible showcase for research achievements in the field of databases and information systems. ADBIS 2008 aimed to create conditions for experienced researchers to impart their knowledge and experience to the young researchers at pre- or post-doctoral level, and to promote interaction and collaboration between European research communities (especially from Central and East Europe) and the rest of the world. The conference encourages contacts between the participants who are nationals of, but active outside, the Member States and Associated States and their colleagues in Member States and Associated States. Special attention is paid to collaboration of researchers in Central and East Europe.

The call for papers attracted 66 submissions from 21 countries. In a rigorous reviewing process the international Program Committee selected 22 papers for publishing in this volume. These papers were reviewed by three reviewers who evaluated their originality, significance, relevance as well as presentation and found their quality suitable for international publication. Topically, the accepted research papers span a wide spectrum of the database and information systems field: from query optimization and transaction processing via design methods to application oriented topics like XML and data on the Web.

Internationally renowned success philosopher, business speaker, and humorist, Larry Winget offers advice that flies in the face of conventional self-help. He believes that the motivational speakers and self-help gurus seem to have forgotten that the operative word in self-help is "self." That is what makes this book so different. Shut Up, Stop Whining, and Get a Life forces all responsibility for every aspect of your life right where it belongs—on you. For that reason, this book will make you uncomfortable. Winget won't let you escape to the excuses that we all find so comforting. The only place you are allowed to go to place the blame for everything that has ever happened to you is to the mirror. The last place most of us want to go.

Shut Up, Stop Whining, and Get a Life is simply a self-help book like no other. It takes on every idea you hold sacred. It trashes the motivational platitudes we have all grown up with and learned to trust. Larry attacks the importance of a positive attitude, the sanctity of marriage, sex, religion, fitness, friendship, money, stress, and happiness. This is anything but conventional wisdom, yet makes so much sense that his ideas are nearly impossible to argue with.

Larry Winget, also known as The Pitbull of Personal Development®, is confrontational in his style, direct in his approach, irritational in his manner, yet Shut Up, Stop Whining, and Get a Life is still hilarious. You will find yourself laughing out loud as he discusses his frustration with people who refuse to take responsibility for their lives and their results. Yet the most interesting part of this book is Winget's emphasis on the importance of love and service to others. He explains that these two factors are the key to all success, happiness, and prosperity in both your personal and professional life.

You probably won't agree with all Larry Winget says in this one-of-a-kind book. You may not like the concepts and ideas he believes will change your life. Winget doesn't care. His ideas aren't for everyone and he readily admits that. He just wants you to look at your life and your business, and if you aren't totally happy with your results, then give his advice a try. If it works, you are way ahead. If it doesn't, you haven't lost anything.

About the Author

LARRY WINGET is known as The Pitbull of Personal Development® and The World's Only Irritational Speaker®. An inductee into the International Speaker's Hall of Fame, he is one of the busiest professional speakers working today.

Although much of the hubris and hyperbole surrounding the 1990's Internet has softened to a reasonable level, the inexorable momentum of information growth continues unabated. This wealth of information provides resources for adapting to the problems posed by our increasingly complex world, but the simple availability of more information does not guarantee its successful transformation into valuable knowledge that shapes, guides, and improves our activity. When faced with something like the analysis of sense-making behavior on the web, traditional research models tell us a lot about learning and performance with browser operations, but very little about how people will actively navigate and search through information structures, what information they will choose to consume, and what conceptual models they will induce about the landscape of cyberspace.

Thus, it is fortunate that a new field of research, Adaptive Information Interaction (AII), is becoming possible. AII centers on the problems of understanding and improving human-information interaction. It is about how people will best shape themselves to their information environments, and how information environments can best be shaped to people. Its roots lie in human-computer interaction (HCI), information retrieval, and the behavioral and social sciences.

This book is about Information Foraging Theory (IFT), a new theory in Adaptive Information Interaction that is one example of a recent flourish of theories in adaptationist psychology that draw upon evolutionary-ecological theory in biology. IFT assumes that people (indeed, all organisms) are ecologically rational, and that human information-seeking mechanisms and strategies adapt the structure of the information environments in which they operate. Its main aim is to create technology that is better shaped to users. Information Foraging Theory will be of interest to student and professional researchers in HCI and cognitive psychology.

About the Author

Peter Pirolli is a Research Fellow in the User Interface Research Area at the Palo Alto Research Center where he has been pursuing studies of human information interaction since 1991. He is an elected Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery Computer-Human Interaction Academy, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Psychological Science, and the National Academy of Education.

The primary reason for this book, the fourth edition of sendmail, is the release of version 8.14 of the sendmail program. Since the release of the third edition, V8.13 and V8.14 sendmail have been released. Each sendmail release has shown marked improvements over earlier releases and, together, they call for a full update of this book.

In addition to folding the new V8.14 information into this book, we have fixed all the errata in the third edition to make this fourth edition much more accurate.

This edition of the sendmail book assumes you are using V8.14, the current version of the sendmail program. It follows the same general format as earlier editions, but we realize this might not be the most convenient arrangement for readers who are primarily interested in what has changed since the last edition. To help minimize this problem, we have added Appendix B, in which the many improvements of the intervening versions of sendmail are categorized by chapter, complete with references to the appropriate sections within this book.

The promise of the Semantic Web to provide a universal medium to exchange data information and knowledge has been well publicized. There are many sources too for basic information on the extensions to the WWW that permit content to be expressed in natural language yet used by software agents to easily find, share and integrate information. Until now individuals engaged in creating ontologies-- formal descriptions of the concepts, terms, and relationships within a given knowledge domain-- have had no sources beyond the technical standards documents.

Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist transforms this information into the practical knowledge that programmers and subject domain experts need. Authors Allemang and Hendler begin with solutions to the basic problems, but dont stop there: they demonstrate how to develop your own solutions to problems of increasing complexity and ensure that your skills will keep pace with the continued evolution of the Semantic Web.

Provides practical information for all programmers and subject matter experts engaged in modeling data to fit the requirements of the Semantic Web.
De-emphasizes algorithms and proofs, focusing instead on real-world problems, creative solutions, and highly illustrative examples.
Presents detailed, ready-to-apply recipes for use in many specific situations.
Shows how to create new recipes from RDF, RDFS, and OWL constructs.

About the Author

Jim Hendler is the Tetherless World Senior Constellation Chair at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute where he has appointments in the Department of Computer Science and the Cognitive Science Dept. He also serves as the Associate Director of the Web Science Research Initiative headquartered at MIT. Hendler has authored about 200 technical papers in the areas of artificial intelligence, Semantic Web, agent-based computing and high performance processing. One of the inventors of the Semantic Web, Hendler was the recipient of a 1995 Fulbright Foundation Fellowship, is a former member of the US Air Force Science Advisory Board, and is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and the British Computer Society. He is also the former Chief Scientist of the Information Systems Office at the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), was awarded a US Air Force Exceptional Civilian Service Medal in 2002, and is a member of the World Wide Web Consortium's Semantic Web Coordination Group. He is the Editor in Chief of IEEE Intelligent Systems and is the first computer scientist to serve on the Board of Reviewing Editors for Science.

Essential Mathematics for Games and Interactive Applications, 2nd edition presents the core mathematics necessary for sophisticated 3D graphics and interactive physical simulations. The book begins with linear algebra and matrix multiplication and expands on this foundation to cover such topics as color and lighting, interpolation, animation and basic game physics. Essential Mathematics focuses on the issues of 3D game development important to programmers and includes optimization guidance throughout.

The new edition Windows code will now use Visual Studio.NET. There will also be DirectX support provided, along with OpenGL - due to its cross-platform nature. Programmers will find more concrete examples included in this edition, as well as additional information on tuning, optimization and robustness.

The book has a companion CD-ROM with exercises and a test bank for the academic secondary market, and for main market: code examples built around a shared code base, including a math library covering all the topics presented in the book, a core vector/matrix math engine, and libraries to support basic 3D rendering and interaction. There is also an associated website with updates and code patches, and PowerPoint slides from presentations.

--Simple game engine with math, rendering, and input libraries on the CD-ROM, so that game developers can immediately start applying the techniques they learn in a basic codebase.
--Exercises on the CD-ROM for educators to use for course material
--Code samples shown throughout the book for real-world application

About the Author

James M. Van Verth is a founding member of Red Storm Entertainment, a division of Ubisoft, where he has been a lead engineer for nine years. For the past eight years he has also been a regular speaker at the Game Developers Conferences, teaching the all-day tutorial Math for Game Programmers, on which this book is based. He has a B.A. in mathematics and computer science from Dartmouth College and M.S. degrees in computer science from the State University of New York at Buffalo and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Lars M. Bishop is an engineer in the Handheld Developer Technologies group at NVIDIA. Prior to joining NVIDIA, Lars was the Chief Technology Officer at Numerical Design Limited, leading the development of the Gamebryo3D cross-platform game engine. He received a BS in Math/Computer Science from Brown University and an MS in Computer Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His outside interests include photography, drumming, and playing bass guitar.

The mathematics that we teach and learn today includes concepts and ideas that once were pondered only by the most brilliant men and women of ancient, and not so ancient, times. Numbers such as 1,000, for example, or two, or zero, were at one time considered very abstract ideas. There was a time when a quantity more than two or three was simply called “many.” Yet we have grown up learning all about quantities and how to manipulate them. We teach even young children the concept of fractions as we ask them to share, or divide, their candy between them. Today, in many ways, what used to be stimulating thought for only the privileged few is now considered child’s play.

Yet scholars, philosophers, scientists, and writers of the past have spent lifetimes devising ways to explain these concepts to benefit merchants, kings, and countries. The idea that two items of different weight could fall to the Earth at the same rate was, in its time, controversial. Creating calculations that pointed to the fact that the Earth revolved around the Sun was heresy. Mathematicians have, in fact, been beheaded by kings, imprisoned by churches, and murdered by angry mobs for their knowledge. Times have changed, thankfully. It is fair to say we have come a long way.

This book is designed to help you come even further in your understanding of algebra. To start with, there is a lot of algebra that you already know. The Additive Identity Property, the Commutative Property of Multiplication, the Multiplicative Property of Equality, and the Zero Product Theorem are already concepts that, while you might not know them by name, are in your personal database of mathematical knowledge. This book will help you identify, and make a connection with, the algebra that you already do know, and it will give you the opportunity to discover new ideas and concepts that you are about to learn.

Understand how to effectively manage stakeholders by taking account of their personal needs and goals

As stakeholder relationships and business in general have become increasingly central to the unfolding of stakeholder thinking, important new topics have begun to take centre stage in both the worlds of practitioners and academics. The role of project management becomes immeasurably more challenging, when stakeholders are no longer seen as simple objects of managerial action but rather as subjects with their own objectives and purposes.

This book will aim to explain some of the complexities of project management and managerial relationships with stakeholders by discussing the practice of stakeholder engagement, dialog, measurement and management and the consequences of this practice for reporting and productivity, and performance within project management.

* Covers new concerns and emerging concepts in stakeholder management
*Written from a practioner's perspective
* Includes relevent case studies and readings

About the Author

John McManus is a practising manager, speaker, teacher and consultant and author in the fields of strategy, project management, software development, business reengineering, total quality management, and change management. A senior manager, John has 15 years front-line software, project, and general management experience. He has managed the development of a variety of software projects, utilizing Rapid Application Development, Structured Software Analysis Design Method, PRINCE and other software led project methodologies. He has managed large project teams and is responsible for providing independent assessments on numerous software projects. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, a professional member of the British Computer Society, a Chartered Software Engineer and holds degrees from Manchester and London Universities.

Tackles the mismatch of business expectations and IT activities

Business expectations of their IT departments are simple: Deliver IT without fuss, get involved in achieving business results, and provide leadership. But while business emphasis is on business results and leadership, IT is focused on the technology.

How to get your IT Department to Add Real Value to Business presents a practical framework that defines the roles and activities for the CIO to meet business expectations. It introduces a new approach to IT in large organizations, which shifts the focus from day to day technological operations to three critical areas of performance for IT: IT management, business results and information leadership.

The concepts are simple and elegant but the implementation is increasingly demanding. However, these changes are essential if in-house IT functions are to survive and prosper in organizations.

The author's framework has already proven itself in changing business and IT perspectives significantly. Large organisations have commenced the implementation process, and are reporting significant results. The book offers ground-breaking perspectives on the role of IT in organisations. These perspectives are finding favour with business and IT people alike. The book offers practical and anecdotal examples and plans to assist in implementing the framework.

*CIOs will benefit from a radically changed perspective on how they can gain real alignment and add real value to their business
*Business management will benefit from a new understanding of what they should expect from their IT functions
*Offers a new common language to talk meaningfully about IT and business issues

About the Author

Terry White is one of the most original thinkers in IT management to surface in recent years. He was one of the first IT gurus to identify the need for IT Departments to radically transform themselves to accommodate the business realities of the 21st century. This has been Terry's clarion call for the past 10 years.

Before becoming a consultant and author, Terry was the CIO for a large industrial concern for many years. He has written numerous articles and academic papers. His last book was titled: "Reinventing the IT department" and he has given seminars and workshops and consulted widely on this topic.

Terry consults to large organisations on business strategy, strategic information management and IT organisation.

He has lectured on a number of MBA and other academic programs.

How Does Your Website Measure Up?

Are you getting the most out of your website? Google insider and web metrics expert Brian Clifton reveals the information you need to get a true picture of your site's impact and stay competitive using Google Analytics (GA) and the latest web metrics methodologies.

Which marketing campaigns work best? How do you quantify their success? What indicators should you track? Packed with techniques and insider secrets not documented elsewhere, Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics has the expert guidance you need to enhance your brand and increase your site's ROI. Learn how to:

• Measure your web traffic and understand its impact on ROI

• Configure your data collection parameters, then extract and analyze the collected data

• Drill down to the precise visitor segments or time periods you choose

• Discover how long it takes for your visitors to convert to customers

• Follow best practices for page tagging and tracking dynamic web pages, Flash events, banners, and more

• Optimize checkout systems, pay-per-click campaigns (including AdWords), SEO, and e-mail marketing, and use ad version testing in conjunction with multivariate testing

• Centralize your data collection and track offline campaigns

About the Author

Brian Clifton, Ph.D., leads the Google Web Analytics team for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. He is a noted web analytics and search engine marketing expert who speaks at industry trade shows (including Search Engine Strategies, Emetrics Summit, and Search Marketing World), maintains a blog on web metrics and Google Analytics (www.advanced-web-metrics.com), and has written numerous white papers.

Explore new worlds . . .

If you ever wondered what might lie beyond the reality we experience every day, if you've ever thrilled to accounts of out-of-body travel and longer to go alone for the ride, this fascinating, practical guide is for you. America's leading expert on out-of-body travel tells the riveting story of his travels to other realms and offers easy-to-use techniques to guide you on your journey of a lifetime'and beyond.

Travel into parallel realities . . .

William Buhlman has trained out-of-body travelers in his workshop for more than a decade, teaching people how to project their consciousness outside the limits of their physical bodies and to explore dimensions and worlds beyond everyday life. Now he vividly recounts how own adventures in the parallel universe described in the new-physics theories of Stephen Hawkins, Paul Davies, and Fred Alan Wolf and presents his step-by-step guide to astral travel'including exercises, tips, techniques, and answers to your every question about out-of-body experiences.

And discover surprising truths about reality, past lives, the soul, and life after death.

Astral travel, Buhlman reveals, not only can expand your conscious'it can help verify the existence of the soul, teach you about past lives, and enhance your daily life. Find out in this compelling handbook for everyone who wants to venture beyond the body and take the ultimate trip.

About the Author

William Buhlman is a frequent guest on the nationally syndicated radio shows Coast to Coast A.M. and Dreamland, and has been featured on the national television show Sightings. Visit the author online.

At its essence, computer science is the study of problems and their solutions. More specifically, computer science is concerned with finding systematic procedures that guarantee a correct solution to a given problem. Such procedures are called algorithms.

This book is about a particular class of algorithms, called recursive algorithms, which turn out to be quite important in computer science. For many problems, the use of recursion makes it possible to solve complex problems using programs that are surprisingly concise, easily understood, and algorithmically efficient. For the student seeing this material for the first time, however, recursion appears to be obscure, difficult, and mystical. Unlike other problemsolving techniques which have closely related counterparts in everyday life, recursion is an unfamiliar idea and often requires thinking about problems in a new and different way. This book is designed to provide the conceptual tools necessary to approach problems from this recursive point of view.

Informally, recursion is the process of solving a large problem by reducing it to one or more subproblems which are (1) identical in structure to the original problem and (2) somewhat simpler to solve. Once that original subdivision has been made, the same decompositional technique is used to divide each of these subproblems into new ones which are even less complex. Eventually, the subproblems become so simple that they can be then solved without further subdivision, and the complete solution is obtained by reassembling the solved components.