In life sciences, scientists collect increasing amounts of data that must be stored, integrated, processed, and analyzed efficiently to make effective use of them. Thereby, not only the huge volume of available data raises challenges regarding storage space and analysis throughput, but also data quality issues, different data formats, and compliance issues such as data provenance make it hard t...

BPMN 2.0 [1] is the de facto standard for business process modeling that provides a graphical notation for specifying business processes in a diagram. In order to re-use parts of the business process, the term of “Process Fragments” has been introduced [2]. A process fragment is a “connected graph, however with significantly relaxed completeness and consistency criteria compared to an executabl...

ii iii Acknowledgements I would first like to thank Prof. Xavier Serra for giving me the opportunity to join the SMC Master's program at the Pompeu Fabra University, and the whole Music Technology Group for providing an excellent intellectual framework for the completion of this thesis, specially the members and SMC students which have somehow influenced the development of this work. Special th...

Due to the fast development of new technologies, the Business Intelligence market is changing rapidly, forcing vendors to adapt their offerings to the customers’ needs. As the amount of data available to companies has been substantially increasing in the past years, the need of suitable software tools that perform the right analyses became essential, even in the small and medium sized business'...

solemnly declare that I have written this master thesis independently, and that I have not made use of any aid other than those acknowledged in this master thesis. Neither this master thesis, nor any other similar work, has been previously submitted to any examination board.

This Master thesis presents the design and implementation of AskMe, a new type of service for mobile telephony, within the area of ubiquitous computing. It is a novel approach to collaborative information retrieval, based on using the context of a community to discover and enquire the most qualified experts than can answer the questions of a subscriber. The work is focused on privacy issues, di...