Sung Hyon Myaeng - Böcker

Work on relationships takes place in many communities, including data modelling, knowledge representation, natural language processing, linguistics, and information retrieval. Unfortunately, continued disciplinary splintering and specialization keeps any one person from being familiar with the full expanse of that work. By including contributions from experts in a variety of disciplines and backgrounds, this volume demonstrates both the parallels that inform work on relationships across a number of fields and the singular emphases that have yet to be fully embraced. The volume is organized into three parts: the first explores types of relationships; the second delves into the role of relationships in knowledge representation and reasoning; and the third presents applications that make central use of relationships.

The International Conference on Asian Digital Libraries (ICADL) is an annual international forum that provides opportunities for researchers and experts to meet and exchange research results, innovative ideas and state-of-the-art de- lopments in the digital libraries of their respective countries. Building on the success of the ?rst ?ve ICADL conferences, the 6th ICADL conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia aimed to further strengthen the collaboration and strategic alliance between the di?erent researchers and experts from the Asia-Paci?c - gion in the ?eld of digital libraries. Thethemeoftheconference,"DigitalLibraries:TechnologyandManagement of Indigenous Knowledge for Global Access," re?ects the shared belief of the - ganizers that success in the development and implementation of digital libraries in the k-economy is based on four key areas: the technologies that are employed to create a user-friendly environment, organization, interaction, navigation, and access to content; a knowledge management approach that ensures all types of knowledge (explicit, tacit and implicit) are included; indigenous content, which implies the creation of suitable and speci?c content to meet the needs of the indigenous community; and global access, which implies that content should be made available across time and space, and also implies that the content should be ?exible enough to meet global needs. The ICADL 2003 began with an opening ceremony and a keynote address.

TheAsiaInformationRetrievalSymposium(AIRS)wasestablishedbytheAsian information retrieval community after the successful series of Information - trieval with Asian Languages (IRAL) workshops held in six di?erent locations in Asia, starting from 1996. While the IRAL workshops had their focus on inf- mation retrieval problems involving Asian languages, AIRS covers a wider scope of applications, systems, technologies and theory aspects of information retrieval in text, audio, image, video and multimedia data. This extension of the scope re?ects and fosters increasing research activities in information retrieval in this region and the growing need for collaborations across subdisciplines. We are very pleased to report that we saw a sharp increase in the number of submissions and their quality, compared to the IRAL workshops. We received 106papersfromninecountriesinAsiaandNorthAmerica,fromwhich28papers (26%) were presented in oral sessions and 38 papers in poster sessions (36%). It was a great challenge for the Program Committee to select the best among the excellent papers. The low acceptance rates witness the success of this year’s conference. After a long discussion between the AIRS 2004 Steering Committee and Springer, the publisher agreed to publish our proceedings in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series, which is SCI-indexed. We feel that this strongly attests to the excellent quality of the papers.

Asia Information Retrieval Symposium (AIRS) was established in 2004 by the Asian information retrieval community after the successful series of Information Retrieval with Asian Languages (IRAL) workshops held in six different locations in Asia, starting from 1996. The AIRS symposium aims to bring together international researchers and developers to exchange new ideas and the latest results in the field of information retrieval (IR). The scope of the symposium covers applications, systems, technologies and theoretical aspects of information retrieval in text, audio, image, video and multi-media data. We are very pleased to report that we saw a sharp and steady increase in the number of submissions and their qualities, compared with previous IRAL workshop series. We received 136 submissions from all over the world including Asia, North America, Europe, Australia, and even Africa, from which 32 papers (23%) were presented in oral sessions and 36 papers in poster sessions (26%). We also held a special session called “Digital Photo Albuming,” where 4 oral papers and 3 posters were presented. It was a great challenge and hard work for the program committee to select the best among the excellent papers. The high acceptance rates witness the success and stability of the AIRS series. All the papers and posters are included in this LNCS (Lecture Notes in Computer Science) proceedings volume, which is S- indexed. The technical program included two keynote talks by Prof. Walter Bender and Prof.