Gerhard Weikum

Equipping machines with comprehensive knowledge of the world’s entities and their relationships has been a longstanding goal of AI. Over the last decade, large-scale knowledge bases, also known as knowledge graphs, have been automatically constructed from web contents and text sources, and have become a key asset for search engines. This machine knowledge can be harnessed to semantically interpret textual phrases in news, social media and web tables, and contributes to question answering, natural language processing and data analytics. This monograph surveys fundamental concepts and practical methods for creating and curating large knowledge bases. It covers models and methods for discovering and curating large knowledge bases from online content, with emphasis on semi-structured web pages with lists, tables etc., and unstructured text sources. Case studies on academic projects and industrial knowledge graphs complement the survey of concepts and methods. The intended audience is students and researchers interested in a wide spectrum of topics: from machine knowledge and data quality to machine learning and data science as well as applications in web content mining and natural language understanding. It will also be of interest to industrial practitioners working on semantic technologies for web, social media, or enterprise content.

Transactional Information Systems is the long-awaited, comprehensive work from leading scientists in the transaction processing field. Weikum and Vossen begin with a broad look at the role of transactional technology in today's economic and scientific endeavors, then delve into critical issues faced by all practitioners, presenting today's most effective techniques for controlling concurrent access by multiple clients, recovering from system failures, and coordinating distributed transactions.The authors emphasize formal models that are easily applied across fields, that promise to remain valid as current technologies evolve, and that lend themselves to generalization and extension in the development of new classes of network-centric, functionally rich applications. This book's purpose and achievement is the presentation of the foundations of transactional systems as well as the practical aspects of the field what will help you meet today's challenges.