Abstract
Digital technologies have become ostensibly ubiquitous and highly expressive over the last 15 years. Today, more people are exploring innovations in information and communications technology in global communication networks, as well as in media tools, to create new aesthetical representational forms of information. In this article, the author discusses and analyzes the concepts and definitions behind digital art and the technological issues related to artistic and cultural heritage applications. © 2007 IEEE.

Abstract
Digital personalities are virtual characters that possess situation dependent, personality revealing behaviors. This paper introduces concepts, current and prospective usages of personality-rich virtual characters, and focus on authoring issues for artists that want to create digital portrays of digital persons. Different categories of digital personalities are introduced, in particular virtual actors for CG-movies are explained in more detail because of the importance of understanding the functioning of virtual actors-other types of virtual personalities will often be build upon the faculties of virtual actors. It is proposed that an essential feature of the prospective authoring process of digital personalities is the support of generalization. This would allow for a "concrete authoring", that modifies and defines concrete cases. Thus, the author would be able to employ concrete cases as basis for generalizations. In this context, possible technologies that would support a concrete authoring process are presented, in particular Case-Based Reasoning.

Abstract
Program slicing is a well known family of techniques intended to identify and isolate code fragments which depend on, or are depended upon, specific program entities. This is particularly useful in the areas of reverse engineering, program understanding, testing and software maintenance. Most slicing methods, and corresponding tools, target either the imperative or the object oriented paradigms, where program slices are computed with respect to a variable or a program statement. Taking a complementary point of view, this paper focuses on the slicing of higher-order functional programs under a lazy evaluation strategy. A prototype of a Haskell slicer, built as proof-of-concept for these ideas, is also introduced.

Abstract
This paper presents Geospatial L-systems, a new extension of L-systems that incorporates geospatial awareness, and shows an application of this new tool in the expeditious modelling of urban environments, integrated with a modelling system with interoperable access to data sources. L-systems have been used in Computer Graphics for the modelling of plants, and in a few experiments to model urban environments. However, the lack of geospatial awareness is a limitation and in spite of some developments like open l-systems introduced the ability to communicate with the environment, there was a need for more flexibility. A new modelling system, named XL3D, generates virtual urban environments automatically from a XL3D document with a modelling specification. This modelling system accesses data sources in a interoperable way and the modelling processes are based on L-systems. The integration of geospatial L-systems with the XL3D modelling system has increased its potential for automation and improved the potential to generate virtual urban environments with a higher level of detail and visual fidelity, with a lower level of complexity of the modelling processes. These facts are shown in a case study where a virtual urban environment taken from an area in the Porto downtown is generated by this solution. © The Eurographics Association 2006.

Abstract

Abstract
The importance of the spatial component of data items has been long recognized and gave rise to a successful line of research and development in Geographic Information Systems (GIS). In many application domains it is also essential to deal with the evolution of data along time and to integrate spatial, temporal and other aspects of the information domain in an expressive and operationally effective manner. Until recently, temporal solutions provided by spatial database systems were semi-temporal approaches lacking full temporal support. As a consequence, most spatial database systems manage snapshots of the present state of facts without fully exploiting historical temporal aspects. This paper provides preliminary results on a spatiotemporal database implementation. The proposed system builds on existing database technologies, TimeDB and Oracle Spatial, for temporal and spatial support, respectively. The justification for the choice of these technologies is given, based on the state of the art in spatial and temporal database research. The integration of the spatial and temporal components is achieved with the extension of the TimeDB implementation layer. A set of goals has been established in order to cover both the integration of the spatial support and the enforcement of the temporal requirements in the extended system. Issues and solutions are presented and illustrative examples show the use of the implemented functionalities.