springer aug 2007 (169 Ergebnisse)

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -Amateur astronomers ¿ particularly deep-sky observers ¿ are always on the lookout for new observing challenges. The Herschel Objects, and How to Observe Them offers the exciting opportunity of retracing the steps of the greatest visual observer and celestial explorer that ever lived. This is a practical guide to seeing the most impressive of Herschel¿s star clusters, nebulae and galaxies.There has never been ¿ and as of the time of submitting this proposal there still isn¿t ¿ an observer¿s book devoted to the Herschel objects. The US-based Astronomical League has for several years sponsored a 'Herschel Club', reflecting the interest amateur astronomers have in this important but less widely known listing. The Herschel Objects, and How to Observe Them covers more than 600 of the brightest of the objects that Herschel saw, with detailed descriptions and images of 150 to 200 of the very best for viewing with amateur telescopes.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 184 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -Agent-based computational modeling with its intrinsic multidisciplinary approach is gaining increasing recognition in the social sciences, particularly in economics, business and finance. The methodology is now widely used to compute analytical models numerically and test them for departures from theoretical assumptions, and to provide stand-alone simulation models for problems that are analytically intractable.This volume is devoted to recent contributions to the field from both the social sciences and computer sciences. It presents applications of agent-based computational methodologies and tools in the social sciences, focusing strongly on the uses, requirements and constraints of agent-based models employed by social scientists. Topics include agent-based macroeconomics, the emergence of norms and conventions, the dynamics of social and economic networks, and behavioral models in financial markets.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 296 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -¿If necessity is the mother of invention, then deregulation is the father, and r- enue management (also known as yield management) is the couple¿s golden child ¿ at least as far as operations research is concerned.¿ (Horner, 2000, p. 47) Deregulation had a signi cant impact on the U.S. airline industry in the late 1970s. Charter and low-cost airlines such as People Express and Southwest wereabletoo erseatsatafractionofthepricechargedbyestablishedcarriers like Pan Am and American Airlines. Due to their di erent cost structure, it seemed to be impossible for the big carriers to o er tickets at the same low price. Yet they had to nd a way to compete. Robert L. Crandall from American Airlines is widely credited with the - lution to the problem:yield management ¿ today calledrevenue management, since it maximizes revenue earned on a ight rather than yield (revenue per passenger mile). The idea was simple: American Airlines ights were only half full on - erage. O ering the empty seats at a discount price would not only enable the carriers to compete with the low-cost airlines but even create additional r- enue, if (1) it were possible to prevent cannibalization, i.e. the sale of discount tickets to consumers who would otherwise be willing to pay full fare, and if (2) it could be assured that only the seats that would otherwise y empty were sold at the low price.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 180 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -For the benefits offered by outsourcing and offshoring, organisations outsourcing to India must however recognise that there are real risks involved, and allocating such risk through a well constructed contract is a crucial step in minimizing such risk. As is the case with respect to any material agreement, the structure of an outsourcing agreement is important because it embodies the rights, remedies, duties and obligations of the parties and provides a blueprint for the parties' relationship.When contracts transcend national boundaries, the national legal regime of any single country becomes inadequate. When the parties to the contract are located in different countries, at least two systems of law impinge upon the transaction and the rules of International Law come into play. Clauses however addressing certain issues can only be governed by Indian Law.Specific legal factors around Data Processing, Intellectual Property and staffing implications (TUPE) must also be given careful consideration.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 232 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Electronic Commerce and Web Technologies, EC-Web 2007, held in Regensburg, Germany, September 3-7, 2007 in conjunction with Dexa 2007.The 22 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 67 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on recommender systems, business process / design aspects, mobile commerce, security and e-payment, Web services computing / semantic Web, e-negotiation and agent mediated systems, and issues in Web advertising. 248 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -Advances in technology have enabled the collection of data from scientific observations, simulations, and experiments at an ever-increasing pace. For the scientist and engineer to benefit from these enhanced data collecting capabilities, it is becoming clear that semi-automated data analysis techniques must be applied to find the useful information in the data. Computational scientific discovery methods can be used to this end: they focus on applying computational methods to automate scientific activities, such as finding laws from observational data. In contrast to mining scientific data, which focuses on building highly predictive models, computational scientific discovery puts a strong emphasis on discovering knowledge represented in formalisms used by scientists and engineers, such as numeric equations and reaction pathways.This state-of-the-art survey provides an introduction to computational approaches to the discovery of scientific knowledge and gives an overview of recent advances in this area, including techniques and applications in environmental and life sciences. The 15 articles presented are partly inspired by the contributions of the International Symposium on Computational Discovery of Communicable Knowledge, held in Stanford, CA, USA in March 2001. More representative coverage of recent research in computational scientific discovery is achieved by a significant number of additional invited contributions.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 344 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Artificial Immune Systems, ICARIS 2007, held in Santos, Brazil, August 2007. The papers are organized in topical sections on search and optimization, classification and clustering, anomaly detection and negative selection, robotics, control and electronics. Modeling papers, conceptual papers, and technical papers and general applications are also included.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 452 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -This volume features the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Trust and Privacy in Digital Business. The 28 papers were all carefully reviewed. They cover privacy and identity management, security and risk management, security requirements and development, privacy enhancing technologies and privacy management, access control models, trust and reputation, security protocols, and security and privacy in mobile environments.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 308 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -Anticipatory behavior in adaptive learning systems is steadily gaining the - terest of scientists, although many researchers still do not explicitly consider the actual anticipatory capabilities of their systems. Similarly to the previous two workshops, the third workshop on anticipatory behavior in adaptive lea- ing systems (ABiALS 2006) has shown yet again that the similarities between di erent anticipatory mechanisms in diverse cognitive systems are striking. The discussions and presentations on the workshop day of September 30th, 2006, during the Simulation of Adaptive Behavior Conference (SAB 2006), con rmed that the investigations into anticipatory cognitive mechanisms for behavior and learning strongly overlap among researchers from various disciplines, including the whole interdisciplinary cognitive science area. Thus, further conceptualizations of anticipatory mechanisms seem man- tory. The introductory chapter of this volume therefore does not only provide an overview of the contributions included in this volume but also proposes a taxonomy of how anticipatory mechanisms can improve adaptive behavior and learning in cognitive systems. During the workshop it became clear that ant- ipations are involved in various cognitive processes that range from individual anticipatory mechanisms to social anticipatory behavior. This book re ects this structure by rst providing neuroscienti c as well as psychological evidence for anticipatorymechanismsinvolvedinbehavior,learning,language,andcognition. Next,individualpredictivecapabilitiesandanticipatorybehaviorcapabilitiesare investigated. Finally, anticipation relevant in social interaction is studied.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 396 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -This volume features contributions from participants of the ESRF symposium on Immunotherapy in 2020¿Visions and Trends for Targeting Inflammatory Diseases held in Potsdam near Berlin, Germany, in October 2006. The symposium presentations covered the main mechanisms of immunoregulation.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 124 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Machines, Computations, and Universality, MCU 2007, held in Orleans, France, September 2007. The 18 revised full papers presented together with nine invited papers cover Turing machines, register machines, word processing, cellular automata, tiling of the plane, neural networks, molecular computations, BSS machines, infinite cellular automata, real machines, and quantum computing.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 340 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -It is now more than fifty years since the first paper on formal specifications of an information system was published by Young and Kent. Even if the term ¿conceptual model¿ was not used at that time, the basic intention of the abstract specification was to a large extent the same as for developing conceptual models today: to arrive at a precise, abstract, and hardware - dependent model of the informational and time characteristics of a data processing problem. The abstract notation should enable the analyst to - ganize the problem around any piece of hardware. In other words, the p- pose of an abstract specification was for it to be used as an invariant basis for designing different alternative implementations, perhaps even using different hardware components. Research and practice of abstract modeling of information systems has since the late fifties progressed through many milestones and achie- ments. In the sixties, pioneering work was carried out by the CODASYL Development committee who in 1962 presented the ¿Information Al- brä. At about the same time Börje Langefors published his elementary message and e-file approach to specification of information systems. The next decade, the seventies, was characterized by the introduction of a large number of new types of, as they were called, ¿data models¿. We saw the birth of, for instance, Binary Data Models, Entity Relationship Models, Relational Data Models, Semantic Data Models, and Temporal Deductive Models.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 484 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -In introducing his essays on the study and understanding of nature and e- lution, biologist Stephen J. Gould writes: [W]e acquire a surprising source of rich and apparently limitless novelty from the primary documents of great thinkers throughout our history. But why should any nuggets, or even akes, be left for int- lectual miners in such terrain Hasn¿t the Origin of Species been read untold millions of times Hasn¿t every paragraph been subjected to overt scholarly scrutiny and exegesis Letmeshareasecretrootedingeneralhumanfoibles. . . . Veryfew people, including authors willing to commit to paper, ever really read primary sources¿certainly not in necessary depth and completion, and often not at all. . . . I can attest that all major documents of science remain cho- full of distinctive and illuminating novelty, if only people will study them¿in full and in the original editions. Why would anyone not yearn to read these works; not hunger for the opportunity [99, p. 6f] It is in the spirit of Gould¿s insights on an approach to science based on p- mary texts that we o er the present book of annotated mathematical sources, from which our undergraduate students have been learning for more than a decade. Although teaching and learning with primary historical sources require a commitment of study, the investment yields the rewards of a deeper understanding of the subject, an appreciation of its details, and a glimpse into the direction research has taken. Our students read sequences of primary sources.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 352 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -An outgrowth of a workshop held by the Community of European Solar Radio Astronomers (CESRA), this volume collects reviews on current research and perspectives on the variable solar corona: high-energy particles, large-scale disturbances such as mass ejections and waves, and radio diagnostics of the coronal plasma. Multiwavelength observations of the Sun with radio instruments and recent space missions are drawn on extensively, as well as input from neighbouring fields e.g. solar wind, Earth's bow shock. Recent developments are discussed alongside key developments in this rapidly evolving field.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 296 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -This work systematically investigates a large number of oscillatory network configurations that are able to describe many real systems such as electric power grids, lasers or even the heart muscle, to name but a few. The book is conceived as an introduction to the field for graduate students in physics and applied mathematics as well as being a compendium for researchers from any field of application interested in quantitative models.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 388 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -Anyone who has ever bought a car, rented an apartment, had a job or conversation that they would rather not see in their employee review may find this book of interest. There is a collision occurring in identity management. Identity technologies are problematic, and many see light at the end of the identity theft tunnel. Yet the innovation is driven by individual tendencies to seek convenience and business imperatives to minimize risk with maximized profit. The light is an oncoming identity train wreck of maximum individual exposure, social risk and minimal privacy. The primary debate over identity technologies is happening on the issue of centralization. RealID is effectively a centralized standard with a slightly distributed back-end (e.g., fifty servers). RealID is a national ID card. Many mechanisms for federated identities, such as OpenID or the Liberty Alliance, imagine a network of identifiers shared on an as-needed or ad-hoc process. These systems accept the limits of human information processing, and thus use models that work on paper. Using models that work on paper results in systematic risk of identity theft in this information economy. There are alternatives to erosions of privacy and increasing fraud. There is an ideal where individuals have multiple devices, including computers, smart cards, and cell phones. Smart cards are credit card devices that are cryptographically secure. This may be shared and misused, or secure and privacy enhancing. Yet such a system requires coordinated investment.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 204 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -1 Ruby is an open source programming language that was released in 1995. th 2 Ruby is ranked 10 in the TIOBE Programming Community index . Ruby 3 on Rails is an open source web framework that was released in 2004. Ruby on Rails is being widely adopted because of its simplicity, 4 maintainability and development speed. Computerworld lists Ruby on Rails as the one of the top 5 technologies for 2007. Motivation for this Book Ruby is often compared with PHP, which is the most commonly used scripting language, and with Java, which is the most commonly used programming language. In the trends graph of TIOBE index you might notice that since the middle of 2006 Ruby shows an increase in usage 5 while PHP and Java show a decrease in usage. OReilly Radar has noted the trend towards an increased usage of Ruby on Rails. Statistics aside, Ruby on Rails has some advantages over PHP, which are discussed below. 1. Ruby on Rails is more object-oriented than PHP, thus providing all the inherent advantages of an object-oriented language such as simplicity, modularity, modifiability, extensibility, maintainability and re-usability. 2. Ruby on Rails is web framework whereas PHP is only a scripting language.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 412 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -The increasing relevance of security to real-life applications, such as electronic commerce, is attested by the fast-growing number of research groups, events, conferences, and summer schools that are studying it. This book presents thoroughly revised versions of eight tutorial lectures given by leading researchers during two International Schools on Foundations of Security Analysis and Design, FOSAD 2006/2007, held in Bertinoro, Italy, in September 2006 and September 2007. 336 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -Tobacco, alcohol, illicit drugs, and secondhand exposure are the nation¿s leading health problems. These acquired problems cause more than half of all deaths per year. First use, as well as some subsequent use, may be voluntary, but after loss of control, continued use is to be expected in an addict. So, prevention is the treatment of choice and also the treatment with the greatest ef cacy. When prevention fails, early intervention and prompt treatment are critical; oth- wise, abuse becomes dependence and with it comes a chronic life-long disease without a speci c cure. This places a great deal of responsibility on the already overburdened primary care physicians, who must identify a disease fraught with denial and whose patients are generally the last ones to know and accept the fact that they are hopelessly addicted and need help. Physician education and competency make early diagnosis more likely, but most practicing phy- cians do not have addiction education or treatment training as part of their undergraduate medical education. Among physicians, tobacco competency has improved, and a smoking history is now a part of almost every new patient assessment. A patient¿s attempts to quit and pharmacologic treatments have been incorporated into most practices in which the physician emphasizes we- ness. Most physicians have prescribed and followed patients treated with ni- tine replacement and Zyban. Progress in the treatment of alcohol abuse and dependence, cocaine and prescription misuse and dependence, and other drugs of abuse has been much slower.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 172 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Parallel Computing Technologies, PaCT 2007, held in conjunction with the Russian-Taiwan symposium on Methods and Tools of Parallel Programming of Multicomputers. It covers models and languages, applications, techniques for parallel programming supporting, cellular automata, as well as methods and tools of parallel programming of multicomputers.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 656 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -Over the last decade studies have shown that physical exercise plays an important role in maintaining an individual's psycho-physical balance. In particular, it has been demonstrated that prolonged regular physical activity (now defined in scientific publications as chronic physical activity) helps to significantly reduce the incidence of neurodegenerative and neuromuscular diseases, which are often associated with ageing, while at the same time bolstering the immune system.Promoting physical activity therefore helps preventing today's major health challenges, such as diabetes, high blood pressure, cardiorespiratory diseases, obesity, osteoporosis, arthritis, and cancer, thus leading to a reduction in healthcare costs and freeing up resources for future generations.The volume will be an essential reading for all health professionals and for residents in medicine and in health and physical exercise.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 240 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -This book contains the refereed proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Logic Programming, ICLP 2007, held in Porto, Portugal. The 22 revised full papers together with two invited talks, 15 poster presentations, and the abstracts of five doctoral consortium articles cover all issues of current research in logic programming, including theory, functional and constraint logic programming, program analysis, answer-set programming, semantics, and applications.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 484 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Symposium on Frontiers of Combining Systems, FroCoS 2007, held in Liverpool, UK, September 2007. The 14 revised full papers presented were carefully selected and are organized in topical sections on combinations of logics, theories, and decision procedures; constraint solving and programming; combination issues in rewriting and programming as well as in logical frameworks and theorem proving systems.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 296 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -PROCESS OPTIMIZATION: A Statistical Approach is a textbook for a course in experimental optimization techniques for industrial production processes and other 'noisy' systems where the main emphasis is process optimization. The book can also be used as a reference text by Industrial, Quality and Process Engineers and Applied Statisticians working in industry, in particular, in semiconductor/electronics manufacturing and in biotech manufacturing industries.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 484 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -In introducing his essays on the study and understanding of nature and e- lution, biologist Stephen J. Gould writes: [W]e acquire a surprising source of rich and apparently limitless novelty from the primary documents of great thinkers throughout our history. But why should any nuggets, or even akes, be left for int- lectual miners in such terrain Hasn¿t the Origin of Species been read untold millions of times Hasn¿t every paragraph been subjected to overt scholarly scrutiny and exegesis Letmeshareasecretrootedingeneralhumanfoibles. . . . Veryfew people, including authors willing to commit to paper, ever really read primary sources¿certainly not in necessary depth and completion, and often not at all. . . . I can attest that all major documents of science remain cho- full of distinctive and illuminating novelty, if only people will study them¿in full and in the original editions. Why would anyone not yearn to read these works; not hunger for the opportunity [99, p. 6f] It is in the spirit of Gould¿s insights on an approach to science based on p- mary texts that we o er the present book of annotated mathematical sources, from which our undergraduate students have been learning for more than a decade. Although teaching and learning with primary historical sources require a commitment of study, the investment yields the rewards of a deeper understanding of the subject, an appreciation of its details, and a glimpse into the direction research has taken. Our students read sequences of primary sources.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 352 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -Welcome to the proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Network- Based Information Systems (NBiS-2007), in conjunction with the 18th Inter- tional Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications DEXA-2007, which was held in Regensburg, Germany, September 3¿4, 2007. The main objective of NBiS-2007 was to bring together scientists, engineers, and researchers from both network systems and information systems with the aimofencouragingtheexchangeofideas,opinions,andexperiencebetweenthese two communities. NBiS started as a workshop and for 9 years it was held together with DEXA International Conference and is the oldest among DEXA Workshops. The wo- shop has been very successful in quantity and quality. We received many paper submissions every year, but as a workshop we could accept only a limited n- ber of papers. This was the rst year that NBiS was run as an international conference together with DEXA. We received 122 research papers from all over the world. The submitted papers were carefully reviewed by at least two reviewers. Based on the review results, the Program Committee members selected 55 high-quality papers to be presented during the NBiS-2007 conference.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 560 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Evolvable Systems, ICES 2007, held in Wuhan, China, in September 2007. The 41 revised full papers collected in this volume are organized in topical sections on digital hardware evolution, analog hardware evolution, bio-inspired systems, mechanical hardware evolution, evolutionary design, evolutionary algorithms in hardware design, and hardware implementation of evolutionary algorithms.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 468 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -A few years ago, in the Wren Library of Trinity College, Cambridge, I came across a remarkable but then little-known album of pencil and watercolour portraits. The artist of most (perhaps all) was Thomas Charles Wageman. Created during 1829¿1852, these portraits are of pupils of the famous mat- matical tutor William Hopkins. Though I knew much about several of the subjects, the names of others were then unknown to me. I was prompted to discover more about them all, and gradually this interest evolved into the present book. The project has expanded naturally to describe the Cambridge educational milieu of the time, the work of William Hopkins, and the later achievements of his pupils and their contemporaries. As I have taught applied mathematics in a British university for forty years, during a time of rapid change, the struggles to implement and to resist reform in mid-nineteenth-century Cambridge struck a chord of recognition. So, too, did debates about academic standards of honours degrees. And my own experiences, as a graduate of a Scottish university who proceeded to C- bridge for postgraduate work, gave me a particular interest in those Scots and Irish students who did much the same more than a hundred years earlier. As a mathematician, I sometimes felt frustrated at having to suppress virtually all of the ne mathematics associated with this period: but to have included such technical material would have made this a very different book.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 448 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second Brazilian Symposium on Bioinformatics, BSB 2007, held in Angra dos Reis, Brazil, in August 2007, co-located with IWGD 2007, the International Workshop on Genomic Databases. The papers address a broad range of current topics in computational biology and bioinformatics.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 196 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -As software systems become ubiquitous, the issues of dependability become more and more crucial. Given that solutions to these issues must be considered from the very beginning of the design process, it is reasonable that dependability is addressed at the architectural level. This book was born of an effort to bring together the research communities of software architectures and dependability.This state-of-the-art survey contains 18 expanded and peer-reviewed papers based on the carefully selected contributions to the Workshop on Architecting Dependable Systems (WADS 2006), organized at the 2006 International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN 2006), held in Philadelphia, PA, USA, in June 2006. It also contains a number of invited papers written by recognized experts in the area. The papers are organized in topical sections on architectural description languages, architectural components and patterns, architecting distributed systems, and architectural assurances for dependability.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 452 pp. Englisch.