DBKDA 2012 : the Fourth International Conference on Advances in Databases, Knowledge, and Data Applications ; February 29 - March 5, 2012, Saint Gilles, Reunion Island

The Fourth International Conference on Advances in Databases, Knowledge, and Data Applications [DBKDA 2012], held between February 29th and March 5th, 2012 in Saint Gilles, Reunion Island, continued a series of international events covering a large spectrum of topics related to advances in fundamentals on databases, evolution of relation between databases and other domains, data base technologies and content processing, as well as specifics in applications domains databases. Advances in different technologies and domains related to databases triggered substantial improvements for content processing, information indexing, and data, process and knowledge mining. The push came from Web services, artificial intelligence, and agent technologies, as well as from the generalization of the XML adoption. High-speed communications and computations, large storage capacities, and loadbalancing for distributed databases access allow new approaches for content processing with incomplete patterns, advanced ranking algorithms and advanced indexing methods. Evolution on e-business, e-health and telemedicine, bioinformatics, finance and marketing, geographical positioning systems put pressure on database communities to push the ‘de facto’ methods to support new requirements in terms of scalability, privacy, performance, indexing, and heterogeneity of both content and technology. We take here the opportunity to warmly thank all the members of the DBKDA 2012 Technical Program Committee, as well as the numerous reviewers. The creation of such a broad and high quality conference program would not have been possible without their involvement. We also kindly thank all the authors who dedicated much of their time and efforts to contribute to DBKDA 2012. We truly believe that, thanks to all these efforts, the final conference program consisted of top quality contributions. Also, this event could not have been a reality without the support of many individuals, organizations, and sponsors. We are grateful to the members of the DBKDA 2012 organizing committee for their help in handling the logistics and for their work to make this professional meeting a success. We hope that DBKDA 2012 was a successful international forum for the exchange of ideas and results between academia and industry and for the promotion of progress in the fields of databases, knowledge, and data applications. We are convinced that the participants found the event useful and communications very open. We also hope the attendees enjoyed the charm of Saint Gilles, Reunion Island

A meta-component model for dynamic adaptation support in a middleware system for interactive TV

Interactive digital television systems should adopt concepts of adaptation in order to make possible the development of configurable and extensible applications. On the other hand, software component technologies allow software designers to design, develop, maintain and evolve software systems based upon the integration, substitution and adaptation of already available, reusable software artifacts. In previous papers we presented an adaptive middleware with this objective. The present paper extends this middleware to include a meta-component model to describe and to represent applications independently of technology aspects. The paper also describes the implementation of the model that has been used to build an example application

A Component Interconnection Model for Interactive Digital Television Systems

Distributed multimedia systems should deal with critical issues such as temporal requirements of audio and video. Such requirements can become more complex when applications are executed in Interactive Digital Television Systems, since there is a diversity of hardware devices, operating systems and communication technologies. In order to fulfill the requirements of such applications, their constituting components need to interact with each other, as well to consider QoS issues related to devices and transmission media. This paper presents a generic interconnection model that allows communication between components in heterogeneous and distributed multimedia environments. Besides, the model supports adaptation in the middleware layer, triggered by QoS and user requirements changes