This book has two main goals: to provide a unifed and structured overview of this growing field, as well as to propose a corresponding software framework, the OpenTL library, developed by the author and his working group at TUM-Informatik. The main objective of this work is to show, how most real-world application scenarios can be naturally cast into a common description vocabulary, and therefore implemented and tested in a fully modular and scalable way, through the defnition of a layered, object-oriented software resulting architecture covers in a seamless way all processing levels, from raw data acquisition up to model-based object.