This book offers researchers in academia and industry an excellent overview of the state-of-the-art in modeling and management of spatial data in distributed environments. It may also be the basis of specialized courses on Web-based geographical information systems. Spatial data is essential in a wide range of application domains today. While geographical applications remain the key target area, spatial properties are required in other contexts such as computer-aided design, robotics and image processing. Associated with these is the constantly growing number of distributed processing architectures, based on, for example, grid systems, sensor data networks, and personalized smart devices. This book links these two research streams, focusing on the modeling and management of spatial data in distributed systems.
Alberto Belussi is associate professor at the Computer Science Department of the University of Verona, Italy. He graduated in Electronic Engineering (with specialization in Computer Science) at Politecnico di Milano (Italy) in 1992 and he received the Ph.D in Computer Science and Automatic Engineering at Politecnico di Milano (Italy) in 1996. During his Ph.D he spent six months at the Computer Science Department of the University of Maryland (USA), where he cooperated with Prof. Christos Faloutsos in the area of spatial query optimisation. His current research interests are: geographical information systems design, design of interfaces for update of geographical data, multi-resolution geographical databases and interoperability in geographical databases.
Barbara Catania is Associate Professor at the Department of Computer and Information Sciences of the University of Genova, Italy. In 1993, she graduated from the University of Genova, Italy, in Information Sciences. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Milan, Italy, in 1998. She has been Visiting Researcher at the European Computer-Industry Research Center of Bull, ICL, and Siemens in Munich, Germany, and at the National University of Singapore. Her main research interests include: deductive and constraint databases, spatial and geographic databases, XML and Web databases, pattern management, indexing techniques, and access control. She is a member of the ACM.
Eliseo Clementini. 1990 Laurea degree in Electronics Engineering (Dr. Eng.) summa cum laude from the University of L'Aquila. 1/90 - 6/93 Research Associate. 7/93 -10/98 Assistant Professor of computer science at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of L'Aquila. 11/98 - to date Associate Professor of computer science at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of L'Aquila. Visiting researcher at Simon Fraser University, Canada, at Hiroshima University, Japan, at National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis, University of Maine, USA, at Technical University of Munich, Germany, and at Department of Geography and Geomatics, University of Glasgow, UK. His main research interests are about modelling and computational aspects of geographic information science.
Elena Ferrari is a full professor of Computer Science at the University of Insubria, Como (Italy). From 1998 until January 2001, she has been an assistant professor at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Milano (Italy). She received the MS degree in Computer Science from the University of Milano (Italy) in 1992. In 1998, she received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the same university. During summer 1996 she has been a visiting researcher at the Department of Computer Science of George Mason University, Fairfax (Virginia). During summers 1997 and 1998 she has been a visiting researcher at Rutgers University, Newark (New Jersey). Her research activities are related to various aspects of data management systems, including web security, access control and privacy, multimedia databases, and temporal databases. She is a member of the ACM and senior member of IEEE.
