Paolo Atzeni - Böcker

On behalf of the Organizing Committee, we would like to welcome you to the proccedings of the 23rd International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER 2004). This conference provided an international forum for technical discussion on conceptual modeling of information systems among researchers, developers and users. This was the third time that this conference was held in Asia; the ?rst time was in Singapore in 1998 and the second time was in Yokohama, Japan in 2001. China is the third largest nation with the largest population in the world. Shanghai, the largest city in China and a great metropolis, famous in Asia and throughout the world, is therefore a most appropriate location to host this conference. This volume contains papers selected for presentation and includes the two keynote talks by Prof. Hector Garcia-Molina and Prof. Gerhard Weikum, and an invited talk by Dr. Xiao Ji. This volume also contains industrial papers and demo/poster papers. An additional volume contains papers from 6 workshops.The conference also featured three tutorials: (1) Web Change Management andDelta Mining: Opportunities andSolutions,by SanjayMadria,(2)A Survey of Data Quality Issues in Cooperative Information Systems, by Carlo Batini, and (3) Visual SQL - An ER-Based Introduction to Database Programming,by Bernhard Thalheim.

The LNCS Journal on Data Semantics is devoted to the presentation of notable work that, in one way or another, addresses research and development on issues related to data semantics. Based on the highly visible publication platform Lecture Notes in Computer Science, this new journal is widely disseminated and available worldwide.The scope of the journal ranges from theories supporting the formal definition of semantic content to innovative domain-specific applications of semantic knowledge. The journal addresses researchers and advanced practitioners working on the semantic web, interoperability, mobile information services, data warehousing, knowledge representation and reasoning, conceptual database modeling, ontologies, and artificial intelligence.

This book presents a collection of coordinated scientificpapers describing the work conducted and the resultsachieved within the LOGIDATA+ project, a research actionfunded by the Italian national research council CNR. Theaim of the LOGIDATA+ project is the definition ofadvanced database systems which significantly extend thefunctionalities of the current systems, with specificreference to the application areas for which relationalsystemsare not considered satisfactory. These new systemswill allow the definitionof data with complex structures,the representation of semantic relationships betweenobjects, and the use of powerful query and update languages. They will be based on a combination of techniquesoriginatingfrom relational databases and logic programming,with contributions from object-oriented programming. The goal of the LOGIDATA+ project is the design, definition,and prototype implementation of a database management systemwith complex structures and a class hierarchy, to beaccessed through a rule-based language. This book presentsan integrated view of the project at the end of the firstphase. The second phase will be mainly concerned with theimplementation of prototypes.

This book presents the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the International Workshop on the Web and Databases, WebDB'98, held in conjunction with EDBT'98 in Valencia, Spain, in March 1998.The 13 revised full papers presented were selected during two rounds of reviewing from initially 37 submissions. The book is divided into sections on Internet programming: tools and applications, integration and access to Web data, hypertext views on databases, and searching and mining the Web.

• Semantic caching • Data warehousing and semantic data mining • Spatial, temporal, multimedia and multimodal semantics • Semantics in data visualization • Semantic services for mobile users • Supporting tools • Applications of semantic-driven approaches These topics are to be understood as specifically related to semantic issues. Contributions submitted to the journal and dealing with semantics of data will be considered even if they are not from the topics in the list. While the physical appearance of the journal issues is like the books from the we- known Springer LNCS series, the mode of operation is that of a journal. Contributions can be freely submitted by authors and are reviewed by the Editorial Board. Contributions may also be invited, and nevertheless carefully reviewed, as in the case for issues that contain extended versions of best papers from major conferences addressing data semantics issues. Special issues, focusing on a specific topic, are coordinated by guest editors once the proposal for a special issue is accepted by the Editorial Board. Finally, it is also possible that a journal issue be devoted to a single text.

• Data warehousing and semantic data mining • Spatial, temporal, multimedia and multimodal semantics • Semantics in data visualization • Semantic services for mobile users • Supporting tools • Applications of semantic-driven approaches These topics are to be understood as specifically related to semantic issues. Contributions submitted to the journal and dealing with semantics of data will be considered even if they are not from the topics in the list. While the physical appearance of the journal issues is like the books from the we- known Springer LNCS series, the mode of operation is that of a journal. Contributions can be freely submitted by authors and are reviewed by the Editorial Board. Contributions may also be invited, and nevertheless carefully reviewed, as in the case for issues that contain extended versions of best papers from major conferences addressing data semantics issues. Special issues, focusing on a specific topic, are coordinated by guest editors once the proposal for a special issue is accepted by the Editorial Board. Finally, it is also possible that a journal issue be devoted to a single text.

This volume contains the best papers presented at the 12th East-European Conference on Advances in Databases and Information Systems (ADBIS 2008) held during S- tember 5–9, 2008, in Pori, Finland. The series of ADBIS conferences is the successor of the annual international workshops with the same title that during 1993-1996 were organized in Russia by the Moscow ACM SIGMOD Chapter. ADBIS 2008 continues the series of ADBIS conferences held in St. Petersburg, Russia (1997), Poznan, Poland (1998), Maribor, Slovenia (1999), Prague, Czech Republic (2000), Vilnius, Lithuania (2001), Bratislava, Slovakia (2002), Dresden, Germany (2003), Budapest, Hungary (2004), Tallinn, Estonia (2005), Thessaloniki, Greece (2006), and Varna, Bulgaria (2007). The conferences are initiated and supervised by an international Steering Committee chaired by professor Leonid Kalinichenko. The ADBIS conferences established an outstanding reputation as a scientific event of high quality serving as an internationally highly visible showcase for research achie- ments in the field of databases and information systems. ADBIS 2008 aimed to create conditions for experienced researchers to impart their knowledge and experience to the young researchers at pre- or post-doctoral level, and to promote interaction and colla- ration between European research communities (especially from Central and East Europe) and the rest of the world. The conference encourages contacts between the p- ticipants who are nationals of, but active outside, the Member States and Associated States and their colleagues in Member States and Associated States. Special attention is paid to collaboration of researchers in Central and East Europe.