Publications

The main goal of the C21 Action is to increase the knowledge and promote the use of ontologies in the domain of Urban Civil Engineering projects, with a view to facilitating communications between information systems, stakeholders and UCE specialists at a European level. In 2007, the Action convened a successful workshop to address emerging issues in the field. The emphasis was on developing a deeper understanding of how ontologies work in practice to inform the development of future ontologies and conceptual tools that will make communication between urban development disciplines easier.
Working Group 3 is interested in the socio-technical issues that emerge during the development and use of ontologies in the organisations and recognises that the introduction of ontologies will impact on working practices within organisations. So WG3 seeks to examine the use of ontological frameworks and systems in practice and to find out how actual use differs from designers’ intentions and what we can learn from these anomalies to design and maintain better ontologies in future.
This volume presents the contributions to the Workshop, and captures the essence of the meeting.

This CR Special focuses on the impacts of climate and land use changes in treelines of several European mountain areas. Treelines, transition zones between the low elevation subalpine forests and the higher elevation low-alpine treeless ecosystems, are important and sensitive indicators of environmental changes. The SENSitive mountain FORest (SENSFOR) COST Action project focuses on the analysis and comparison of biological and socioecological data from European mountain areas, and also presents case studies from various European regions.

The Internet has been transformed in the past years from a system primarily oriented on information provision into a medium for communication and community-building. The notion of “Web 2.0”, social software, and social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace have emerged in this context. With such platforms comes the massive provision and storage of personal data that are systematically evaluated, marketed, and used for targeting users with advertising. In a world of global economic competition, economic crisis, and fear of terrorism after 9/11, both corporations and state institutions have a growing interest in accessing this personal data. Here, contributors explore this changing landscape by addressing topics such as commercial data collection by advertising, consumer sites and interactive media; self-disclosure in the social web; surveillance of file-sharers; privacy in the age of the internet; civil watch-surveillance on social networking sites; and networked interactive surveillance in transnational space. This book is a result of a research action launched by the COST Action IS0807- Living in Surveillance Society.