First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This volume constitutes the proceedings of REFLECTION 2001, the Third Int- national Conference on Metalevel Architectures and Separation of Crosscutting Concerns, which was held in Kyoto, September 25-28, 2001. Metalevel architectures and re?ection have drawn the attention of researchers and practitioners throughout computer science. Re?ective and metalevel te- niques are being used to address real-world problems in such areas as: progr- ming languages, operating systems, databases, distributed computing, expert systems and web computing. Separation of concerns has been a guiding principle of software engineering for nearly 30 years, but its known bene?ts are seldom fully achieved in practice. This is primarily because traditional mechanisms are not powerful enough to handle many kinds of concerns that occur in practice. Over the last 10 years, to overcome the limitations of traditional frameworks, many researchers, including several from the re?ection community, have proposed new approaches. For the ?rst time, papers on advanced approaches to separation of concerns were explicitly solicited. Following the success of previous conferences such as IMSA’92 in Tokyo, Re?ection’96 in San Francisco, and Re?ection’99 in Saint Malo, we hope that the conference provided an excellent forum for researchers with a broad range of interests in metalevel architectures, re?ective techniques, and separation of concerns in general.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Meta-Level Architectures and Reflection, Reflection'99, held in St. Malo, France in July 1999. The 13 revised full papers presented were carefully selected from 44 submissions. Also included are six short papers and the abstracts of three invited talks. The papers are organized in sections on programming languages, meta object protocols, middleware/multi-media, work in progress, applications, and meta-programming. The volume covers all current issues arising in the design and analysis of reflective systems and demontrates their practical applications.

The importance of object-oriented metalevel architectures, metaobjects, and reflection continues to grow in computer science. This applies to traditional fields such as artificial intelligence and object-oriented programming languages as well as to parallel processing and operating systems. Advances in Object-Oriented Metalevel Architectures and Reflection presents some of the standard-setting research in this field. The book is structured with and introductory chapter that lays the necessary foundation for readers new to the field. The next five parts discuss operating systems, artificial intelligence, languages, concurrent objects, and application support. Each part itself has a brief introduction that presents the basics for understanding the particular topic.

The development of database technology has currently reached the stage of deductive database systems which use Horn clauses for defining relations. An important characteristic of these systems is the clear separation of logic and control. However, the programmer cannot affect the control part of a deductive database system. To eliminate this deficiency, this monograph presents a so-called expert deductive database system that allows explicit control of the deduction process. The system consists of an object-level describing the logical aspects of a problem and of a meta-level that contains application-specific control information affecting the object-level deduction process. For example, object-level rules can be disregarded, and some tuples deduced at the object-level can be preferred to others. Besides the architecture of this system, the book also identifies some important possibilities of deduction control which are explained by characteristic examples.

The Mirror of Laughter presents a theory of humor and laughter by examining their relationship to human behaviors. Kozintsev is especially interested in the relationship between biological and cultural factors that influence behaviors. He divides his work into four chapters, the first of which establishes a theme of the book, focusing on the study of meaning from the perspective of philosophy and psychology, while examining linguistic theories of humor. The second chapter examines biological data regarding laughter and the evolutionary origins of laughter and humor. It demonstrates the author's interest in studying humor objectively by detailing physiological reactions and underlying psychological issues. The third section on play, including linguistic play, distinguishes between orderly and disorderly play. While orderly play has no biological roots and is synonymous with culture, disorderly play is rooted in the pre-human past. The final chapter discusses the conflict between culture and nature and how culture has transformed the original semantics of laughter. Kozintsev seeks to understand the relationship between the biological, cultural, and social origins of humor and, from here, he seeks to create new understanding that only the alliance of several disciplines could provide. All of this is done while the author challenges many popular ideas of humor, such as that humor is inherently related to hostility. Originally written in Russian, this work makes great strides towards its goal, and it does so in an interesting and enlightening way.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Applications of Graph Transformations, AGTIVE 2011, held in Budapest, Hungary, in October 2011. The 13 revised full papers presented together with 2 invited talks, 2 application reports and 3 tool demonstration papers were carefully selected from 36 submissions during two rounds of reviewing and improvement. The papers are organized in topical sections on invited talk abstracts, model-driven engineering, graph transformation applications, tool demonstrations, graph transformation exploration techniques, graph transformation semantics and reasoning, application reports and bidirectional transformations.