We are facing an immense growth of digital data and information resources, both in terms of size, complexity, modalities and intrusiveness. Almost every aspect of our existence is being digitally captured. This is exemplified by the omnipresent existence of all kinds of data storage, far beyond those stored in traditional relational databases. The spectrum of data being digitally stored runs from multimedia data repositories to your purchases in most stores. Every tweet that you broadcast is captured for posterity. Needless to say this situation posses new research opportunities, challenges and problems in the ways we store, manipulate, search, and - in general - make use of such data and information. Attempts to cope with these problems have been emerging all over the world with thousands of people devoted to developing tools and techniques to deal with this new area of research. One of the prominent scholars and researchers in this field was the late Professor Ashley Morris who died suddenly and tragically at a young age. Ashley's career begun in industry, where he specialized in databases.
This volume is dedicated to the memory of Professor Ashley Morris who passed away some two years ago. Ashley was a close friend of all of us, the editors of this volume, and was also a Ph.D. student of one of us. We all had a chance to not only fully appreciate, and be inspired by his contributions, which have had a considerable impact on the entire research community. Due to our personal relations with Ashley, we also had an opportunity to get familiar with his deep thinking about the areas of his expertise and interests. Ashley has been involved since the very beginning of his professional career in database research and practice. Notably, he introduced first some novel solution in database management systems that could handle imprecise and uncertain data, and flexible queries based on imprecisely specified user interests. He proposed to use for that purpose fuzzy logic as an effective and efficient tool. Later the interests of Ashley moved to ways of how to represent and manipulate more complicated databases involving spatial or temporal objects. In this research he discovered and pursued the power of Geographic Information Systems (GISs).
These two main lines of Ashley’s research interests and contributions are reflected in the composition of this volume. Basically, we collected some significant papers by well known researchers and scholars on the above mentioned topics. The particular contributions will now be briefly summarized to help the reader get a view of the topics covered and the contents of the particular contributions.
