Christian Kop - Böcker

Conceptual modeling is fundamental to any domain where one must cope with complex real-world situations and systems because it fosters communication - tween technology experts and those who would bene?t from the application of those technologies. Conceptual modeling is the key mechanism for und- standing and representing the domains of information system and database - gineering but also increasingly for other domains including the new “virtual” e-environmentsandtheinformationsystemsthatsupportthem.Theimportance of conceptual modeling in software engineering is evidenced by recent interest in “model-drivenarchitecture”and“extremenon-programming”.Conceptualm- eling also plays a prominent rolein various technical disciplines and in the social sciences. The Annual International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (referred to as the ER Conference) provides a central forum for presenting and discussing current research and applications in which conceptual modeling is the major emphasis. In keeping with this tradition, ER 2005, the 24th ER Conference, spanned the spectrum of conceptual modeling including research and practice in areas such as theories of concepts and ontologies underlying conceptual m- eling, methods and tools for developing and communicating conceptual models, and techniques for transforming conceptual models into e?ective (information) system implementations. Moreover, new areas of conceptual modeling incl- ing Semantic Web services and the interdependencies of conceptual modeling with knowledge-based, logical and linguistic theories and approaches were also addressed.

We are pleased to present the proceedings of the workshops held in conjunction with ER 2005, the 24th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling. The objective of these workshops was to extend the spectrum of the main conferencebygivingparticipantsanopportunitytopresentanddiscussemerging hot topics related to conceptual modeling and to add new perspectives to this key mechanism for understanding and representing organizations, including the new “virtual” e-environments and the information systems that support them. To meet this objective, we selected 5 workshops: – AOIS 2005: 7th International Bi-conference Workshop on Agent-Oriented Information Systems – BP-UML 2005: 1st International Workshop on Best Practices of UML – CoMoGIS 2005: 2nd International Workshop on Conceptual Modeling for Geographic Information Systems – eCOMO 2005: 6th International Workshop on Conceptual Modeling - proaches for E-business – QoIS 2005: 1st International Workshop on Quality of Information Systems These 5 workshops attracted 18, 27, 31, 9, and 17 papers, respectively. F- lowing the ER workshopphilosophy, program committees selected contributions on the basis of strong peer reviews in order to maintain a high standard for accepted papers. The committees accepted 8, 9, 12, 4, and 7 papers, for acc- tance ratesof 44%,33%,39%,44%, and 41%,respectively. In total, 40 workshop papers were selected out of 102 submissions with a weighted averageacceptance rate of 40%.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems, NLDB 2006, held in Klagenfurt, Austria in May/June 2006 as part of UNISCON 2006. The book presents 17 revised full papers and 5 revised short papers, organized in topical sections on concepts extraction and ontology, ontologies and task repository utilization, query processing, information retrieval and dialog processing, and NLP techniques.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of UNISCON 2008 held in Klagenfurt, Austria, during April 22-25, 2008. UNISCON combines the ECOMO workshop series and the ISTA conference series. The 19 papers dealing with conceptual modeling, model-driven software development and information systems applications represent a 30% selection from the original set of submissions. They are completed by two keynote lectures and 35 papers from internationally renowned researchers, invited in honor of Heinrich C. Mayr, whose 60th birthday is also celebrated at this event, that he originally created.

Constitutes the post-conference proceedings of the International Workshop on Ontology, Conceptualization and Epistemology for Information Systems, Software Engineering and Service Sciences (ONTOSE 2010), held at the CAiSE 2010 conference in Hammamet, Tunisia, June, 2010.