This volume represents the compiled conference proceedings for the TOP Biodiversity Conference that took place in June 2010 at Intercollege-Larnaca in Cyprus

The European Academy of Land Use and Development (EALD) organizes annual symposiums on topics related to the interactions between people and the land in both rural and open environment. This book contains articles of experts from 14 different European countries with different professional background. It covers the following generalized topics: Interactions between landscape transformation and the structure of social systems and ecosystem services - the role of institutions and stakeholders in land use change - the various impacts of land use changes - coordination requirements in land use planning - approaches to address specific challenges in land management - stumbling blocks of integral land management.

We are witnessing an alarming, global biodiversity crisis with an ongoing loss of species and their habitats. In response, a number of tools and approaches – including some that are contested – are being explored and promoted. Biodiversity offsets are one such approach, and deserve critical examination since the debate surrounding them has often been oversimplified and lacking practical evidence. As such, this study presents a refined typology including seven types of biodiversity offsets and taking into account different contexts, governance arrangements and drivers. It draws on a detailed analysis of theoretical concepts to explain the voluntary implementation of biodiversity offsets using an internet-based (netnographic) research approach. Furthermore it builds on a broad global explorative base of 72 practical examples and presents in-depth case studies for each type. The results reveal a number of global tendencies that allow recommendations to be made for different locations, contexts and stakeholders. They also encourage the expansion of this research field to respond to the pressing needs of policy and practice.

The latest advances in Artificial Intelligence and (deep) Machine Learning in particular revealed a major drawback of modern intelligent systems, namely the inability to explain their decisions in a way that humans can easily understand. While eXplainable AI rapidly became an active area of research in response to this need for improved understandability and trustworthiness, the field of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KRR) has on the other hand a long-standing tradition in managing information in a symbolic, human-understandable form. This book provides the first comprehensive collection of research contributions on the role of knowledge graphs for eXplainable AI (KG4XAI), and the papers included here present academic and industrial research focused on the theory, methods and implementations of AI systems that use structured knowledge to generate reliable explanations. Introductory material on knowledge graphs is included for those readers with only a minimal background in the field, as well as specific chapters devoted to advanced methods, applications and case-studies that use knowledge graphs as a part of knowledge-based, explainable systems (KBX-systems). The final chapters explore current challenges and future research directions in the area of knowledge graphs for eXplainable AI. The book not only provides a scholarly, state-of-the-art overview of research in this subject area, but also fosters the hybrid combination of symbolic and subsymbolic AI methods, and will be of interest to all those working in the field.

This book explores cultural sustainability and its relationships to heritage from a wide interdisciplinary perspective. By examining the interactions between people and communities in the places where they live it exemplifies the diverse ways in which a people-centred heritage builds identities and supports individual and collective memories. It encourages a view of heritage as a process that contributes through cultural sustainability to human well-being and socially- and culturally-sensitive policy. With theoretically-informed case studies from leading researchers, the book addresses both concepts and practice, in a range of places and contexts including landscape, townscape, museums, industrial sites, every day heritage, ‘ordinary’ places and the local scene, and even UNESCO-designated sites. The contributors, most of whom, like the editors, were members of the COST Action ‘Investigating Cultural Sustainability’, demonstrate in a cohesive way how the cultural values that people attach to place are enmeshed with issues of memory, identity and aspiration and how they therefore stand at the centre of sustainability discourse and practice. The cases are drawn from many parts of Europe, but notably from the Baltic, and central and south-eastern Europe, regions with distinctive recent histories and cultural approaches and heritage discourses that offer less well-known but transferable insights. They all illustrate the contribution that dealing with the inheritance of the past can make to a full cultural engagement with sustainable development. The book provides an introductory framework to guide readers, and a concluding section that draws on the case studies to emphasise their transferability and specificity, and to outline the potential contribution of the examples to future research, practice and policy in cultural sustainability. This is a unique offering for postgraduate students, researchers and professionals interested in heritage management, governance and community participation and cultural sustainability.

The abundance of information and increase in computing power currently enable researchers to tackle highly complicated and challenging computational problems. Solutions to such problems are now feasible using advances and innovations from the area of Artificial Intelligence. The general focus of the AIAI conference is to provide insights on how Artificial Intelligence may be applied in real-world situations and serve the study, analysis and modeling of theoretical and practical issues. This volume contains papers selected for presentation at the 6th IFIP Conference on Artificial Intelligence Applications and Innovations (AIAI 2010) and held in Larnaca, Cyprus, during October 6–7, 2010. IFIP AIAI 2010 was co-organized by the University of Cyprus and the Cyprus University of Technology and was sponsored by the Cyprus University of Technology, Frederick University and the Cyprus Tourism Organization. AIAI 2010 is the official conference of the WG12.5 “Artificial Intel- gence Applications” working group of IFIP TC12, the International Federation for Information Processing Technical Committee on Artificial Intelligence (AI). AIAI is a conference that grows in significance every year attracting researchers from different countries around the globe. It maintains high quality, standards and welcomes research papers describing technical advances and engineering and ind- trial applications of intelligent systems. AIAI 2010 was not confined to introducing how AI may be applied in real-life situations, but also included innovative methods, techniques, tools and ideas of AI expressed at the algorithmic or systemic level.