Information Processing and Management

It is my pleasure to write the preface for Information Processing and Management. This book aims to bring together innovative results and new research trends in inf- mation processing, computer science and management engineering. If an information processing system is able to perform useful actions for an obj- tive in a given domain, it is because the system knows something about that domain. The more knowledge it has, the more useful it can be to its users. Without that kno- edge, the system itself is useless. In the information systems field, there is conceptual modeling for the activity that elicits and describes the general knowledge a particular information system needs to know. The main objective of conceptual modeling is to obtain that description, which is called a conceptual schema. Conceptual schemas are written in languages called conceptual modeling languages. Conceptual modeling is an important part of requi- ments engineering, the first and most important phase in the development of an inf- mation system.