This paper proposes a framework dedicated to the construction of what we call discrete elastic inner product allowing one to embed sets of nonuniformly sampled multivariate time series or sequences of varying lengths into inner product space structures. This framework is based on a recursive definition that covers the case of multiple embedded time elastic dimensions. We prove that such inner products exist in our general framework and show how a simple instance of this inner product class operates on some prospective applications, while generalizing the euclidean inner product. Classification experimentations on time series and symbolic sequences data sets demonstrate the benefits that we can expect by embedding time series or sequences into elastic inner spaces rather than into classical euclidean spaces. These experiments show good accuracy when compared to the euclidean distance or even dynamic programming algorithms while maintaining a linear algorithmic complexity at exploitation stage, although a quadratic indexing phase beforehand is required.

A Tabu move merge split (TMMS) algorithm is proposed for the polygonal approximation problem. TMMS incorporates a tabu principle to avoid premature convergence into local minima. TMMS is compared to optimal, near to optimal top down multi-resolution (TDMR) and classical split and merge heuristics solutions. Experiments show that potential improvements for crudest approximations can be obtained. The evaluation is carried out on 2D geographic maps according to effectiveness and efficiency measures.

We present in this article a method to wisely replicate information in an unstructured peer-to-peer network. We make no assumption on the network topology. Thematic agents move randomly on the network and estimate the level of redundancy of the specific information they are dealing with. They can delete or create replicas if this estimated redundancy is too high or too low. Experiments show that we can achieve an homogeneous distribution of information in a distributed environment while achieving a high level of fault tolerance.

Focused structured document retrieval employs the concept of best entry point (BEP), which is intended to provide optimal starting-point from which users can browse to relevant document components [4]. In this paper we describe and evaluate a method for finding BEPs in XML documents. Experiments conducted within the framework of INEX 2006 evaluation campaign on the Wikipedia XML collection [2] shown the effectiveness of the proposed approach.