This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Extending Database Technology, EDBT '98, held in Valencia, Spain, in March 1998. The 32 revised full papers presented together with one invited keynote were selected from a total of 191 submissions. The book is divided in sections on similarity search and indexing, query optimization on the Web, Algorithms for data mining, modelling in OLAP, query processing and storage management, aggregation and summary data, object-oriented and active databases, view maintenance and integrity, databases and the Web, workflow and scientific databases.

EDBT 2000 is the seventh conference in a series dedicated to the advancement of database technology. This year’s conference special theme, \Connect Millions of Users and Data Sources," underscores the importance of databases for the information age that is dawning with the new millennium. The importance - rives not just from the observation that the information age essentially rests on theconvergenceofcommunications,computing,andstorage.Equallyimportant, many of the concepts and techniques underlying the success of databasesystems have independent meaning and impact for today’s distributed information s- tems. The papers in the volume should also be seen in this light. The EDBT 2000 conference program includes 30 research papers selected by the program committee out of 187 submissions, covering advances in research, development, and applications of databases. The conference program also - cludes six industry andapplications papers,a panel discussion,six tutorials,and several software demonstrations. The conference features three distinguished - vited speakers: Ashish Gupta discusses database issues in electronic commerce, Stefano Ceri addresses the impact and challenges of XML on databases, and Andreas Reuter shares his views on new perspectives on database technology. The technical contributions presented at the EDBT 2000 conference are colle- ed and preserved in this volume that we are pleased to present to you with the expectation that it will serve as a valuable research and reference tool in your professional life.

This book consists of the refereed proceedings of the 15th British National Conference on Databases, BNCOD 15, held in London, in July 1997. The 12 revised full papers presented were selected from more than 30 submissions. Also included are 10 poster presentations and the invited lecture on The Role of Intelligent Software Agents in Advanced Information Systems by Larry Kerschberg. The papers are organized in topical sections on transaction processing, optimization, object-orientation and the Internet, and database integration.

This volume includes very high quality papers in different areas of computer and information sciences. The main themes are (computer network) performance evaluation and artificial neural networks and their applications. The latest developments in these areas are presented by a number of distinguished researchers from all over the world. These proceedings of The 13th International Symposium on Computer and Information Sciences (ISCIS'98) contain outstanding papers specifically related to the areas of "Gelenbe" neural networks and their applications, performance of computer-communication networks, simulations and analytic methods in order to study the performance of telecommunication networks, scheduling and resource allocation in computer and multimedia systems, stochastic ordering applied to performance evaluation, and simulation of virtual humans.

This book presents the refereed proceedings of the EP'98 and RIDT'98 conferences, held jointly during the Second International Week on Electronic Publishing and Typography in St. Malo, France, in March/April 1998. The 43 revised full papers presented were carefully selected for inclusion in the book. Among the topics covered are artistic imaging, tools and methods in typography, non-latin type, typographic creation, imaging, character recognition, handwriting models, legibility and design issues, fonts and design, time and multimedia, electronic and paper documents, document engineering, documents and linguistics, document reuse, hypertext and the Web, and hypertext creation and management.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second Australasian Conference on Information Security and Privacy, ACISP'97, held in Sydney, NSW, Australia, in July 1997. The 20 revised full papers presented were carefully selected for inclusion in the proceedings. The book is divided into sections on security models and access control, network security, secure hardware and implementation issues, cryptographic functions and ciphers, authentication codes and secret sharing systems, cryptanalysis, key escrow, security protocols and key management, and applications.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, PAKDD-98, held in Melbourne, Australia, in April 1998. The book presents 30 revised full papers selected from a total of 110 submissions; also included are 20 poster presentations. The papers contribute new results to all current aspects in knowledge discovery and data mining on the research level as well as on the level of systems development. Among the areas covered are machine learning, information systems, the Internet, statistics, knowledge acquisition, data visualization, software reengineering, and knowledge based systems.

CAiSE 2000 was the 12th in the series of International Conferences on Advanced Information Systems Engineering. In the year 2000 the conference returned to Stockholm where it was organized the very first time. Since that year, 1989, the CAiSE conferences have developed into an important forum for the presentation and exchange of research results and practical experiences within the field of Information Systems Engineering. The objective of the CAiSE conference series is to bring together researchers and practitioners in the field of information systems engineering to meet annually in order to discuss evolving research issues and applications in this field. The CAiSE conference series also aims to provide an opportunity for young scientists to establish relationships with senior scientists in their areas of interest. Stockholm is an important center of research and development for some of the leading IT and communications companies in Europe and indeed, in the world. In tune with this environment, a major theme of CAiSE 2000 was "information systems and services in a digitized world". This theme reflects the vast improvements in communication technology, including the increasing use of Internet and WWW, that has taken place over the last years, and that has led to better communication and easier information access in general. In addition, this development has initiated changes in the way organizations cooperate and trade.

This book constitutes the strictly reviewed post-workshop documentation of the First International Conference on Cooperative Multimodal Communication held in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, in 1995. The volume presents an introductory survey and carefully re vised and updated full versions of three invited contributions and 14 papers selected for inclusion in the book after intensive reviewing. Among the issues addressed are intelligent multimedia retrieval, cooperative conversation, agent system communication, multimodal maps, multimodal plan presentation, multimodal user interfaces, multimodal dialog, and various systems for multimodal HCI.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third Latin American Symposium on Theoretical Informatics, LATIN'98, held in Campinas, Brazil, in April 1998. The 28 revised full papers presented together with five invited surveys were carefully selected from a total of 53 submissions based on 160 referees' reports. The papers are organized in sections on algorithms and complexity; automata, transition systems and combinatorics on words; computational geometry and graph drawing; cryptography; graph theory and algorithms on graphs; packet routing; parallel algorithms; and pattern matching and browsing.