From the Editor, Issue 27, 2004

Letter from the Special Issue Editor

The explosion in the volume of digital data and its wide availability is revolutionizing many scientific domains. At the same time, scientists faced with this data deluge must overcome many challenges to manage and explore these data. Complex processes are needed to acquire, process, and analyze the data. Even through there are robust and efficient databases systems, they fail to meet many of t...

Letter from the Special Issue Editor

Researchers in several scientific disciplines are struggling to cope with the masses of data resulting from either increasingly precise instruments or from simulation runs on ever more powerful supercomputers. Efficiently managing this deluge of data has become key to understand the phenomena they are studying. Scientists in the simulation sciences, for example, build increasingly big and detai...

Letter from the Special Issue Editor

Personalization takes data management to a new frontier where each user is able to get a tailored service according to his/her personal preferences, behavior, and surrounding context. This special issue includes ten articles that address various aspects of personalization, namely, preference queries, context-aware data management, and recommender systems. The issue starts with two articles that...

Csae Wps/2004-27

A funeral is a costly occasion. This paper studies indigenous insurance institutions developed to cope with the high costs of funerals, based on evidence from rural areas in Tanzania and Ethiopia. These institutions are based on well-defined rules and regulations, often offering premium-based insurance for funeral expenses. Increasingly, they are also offering other forms of insurance and credi...

Special Issue Editor