The amount of available data has been growing significantly over the last decades. Thus, linking entries across heterogeneous data sources such as databases or knowledge bases, becomes an increasingly difficult problem, in particular w.r.t. the runtime of these tasks. Consequently, it is of utmost importance to provide time-efficient approaches for similarity joins in the Web of Data. While a n...

Reductions in marketing costs can be achieved through the use of standardized package sizes. In addition to a lower inventory investment in packaging materials, mass production of the fewer types of consumer packages and shipping boxes is facilitated. Size standardization can help make more efficient use of storage space at all levels of distribution and simplify, expedite, and cut the costs of...

Fumonisins are mycotoxins found in maize. In developing countries, the resources required for analysis are often lacking, and the shipping of maize between countries can be difficult since the importation of plant materials requires permits/inspection to prevent the entry of pests that frequently infest maize. A simple, safe and legal method for shipping maize extracts to the USA was needed to ...

This paper describes experience obtained through a joint project between a university research group and a shipping company in developing a prototype for a global customer service system. The research group had no previous knowledge of the complex business of shipping, but succeeded in developing a prototype that more than fulfilled the expectations of the shipping company. A major reason for t...

XQuery is increasingly being used for ad-hoc integration of heterogeneous data sources that are logically mapped to XML. For example, scientists need to query multiple scientific databases, which are distributed over a large geographic area, and it is possible to use XQuery for that. However, the language currently supports only the data shipping query evaluation model (through the document() f...

We investigate the hardness of approximating a transshipment problem with a permutable transit vector. We have already known that the transshipment problem of minimizing the total shipping cost is NP-hard. In this paper, we prove that even if the unit shipping cost associated with every arc is given as a positive integer, there is no polynomial time constant factor approximation algorithm for t...