SOFSEM 2002: Theory and Practice of Informatics 29th Conference on Current Trends in Theory and Practice of Informatics, Milovy, Czech Republic, November 22-29, 2002, Proceedings

Forthe29thtime,SOFSEM(SOFtwareSEMinar)washeld.Havingtransformed over the years from a local event to a fully international conference, the c- temporary SOFSEM is a mix of a winter school and a conference striving for multidisciplinarity in computer science, accompaniedby workshops dedicated to a narrow ?eld (this year multimedia and softcomputing) and a student forum. This volume constitutes the proceedings of SOFSEM 2002 held in Milovy, Czech Republic, November 22–29, 2002. This year, 23 papers were submitted from 11 countries. The selection of the 11 best papers accepted by the Program Committee was based on their contribution to the state of the art, technical soundness, clarity of presentation, and relevance of bibliography. The Steering Committee supported by the Advisory Board recommended 12 invited talks focusedonthefollowingkeytopicareas:distributedandparallelsystems,system design and testing, databases and information systems, and fundamentals. SOFSEM is the result of considerable e?ort by a number of people. It is our pleasure to record our thanks to the Advisory Board for its support, to the Steering Committee for its general guidance, and to the Organizing Committee for making SOFSEM 2002 happen. It has been an honor for us to work with the members of the Program Committee and other referees who devoted a lot of e?ort to reviewing the submitted papers.

INVITED TALKS.- Conformance Testing Techniques for Timed Systems.- Counter-Constrained Finite State Machines: A New Model for Component Protocols with Resource-Dependencies.- Equivalence-Checking with Infinite-State Systems: Techniques and Results.- On Functions and Types: A Tutorial.- Database Support for Multisource Multiresolution Scientific Data.- Semantic Annotation and Indexing of News and Sports Videos.- Multimedia Presentations Databases (Extended Abstract).- Interactive Indexing and Retrieval of Multimedia Content.- A Model-Based Approach to Semantic-Based Retrieval of Visual Information.- Bipolarity in Possibilistic Logic and Fuzzy Rules (Extended Abstract).- PANEL SESSION.- Data Management Challenges for GRID Computing.- CONTRIBUTED PAPERS.- Hungarian Speech Synthesis Using a Phase Exact HNM Approach.- Modelling Resource Transitions in Constraint-Based Scheduling.- A Specification Framework for Real-Time Scheduling.- String Transformation for n-Dimensional Image Compression.- Validation and Decomposition of Partially Occluded Images.- Solving Conflicts of Agent Knowledge States in Multiagent Systems.- Specification and Verification of Secure Business Transaction Systems.- Agent-Oriented Model of Simulated Evolution.- The Reconstruction of Some 3D Convex Polyominoes from Orthogonal Projections.- The Complexity of Probabilistic versus Quantum Finite Automata.- Do We Need Liveness? – Approximation of Liveness Properties by Safety Properties.