This book presents the reader with a complete and comprehensive picture of what is happening today in banks and other financial institutions in terms of expert systems implementation. In addition it helps in refining the reader's thoughts on how to build an environment for the successful implementation of expert systems in banking - and how to sell this concept to management including risks and opportunities.

The Database and Expert Systems Applications - DEXA - conferences are dedi cated to providing an international forum for the presentation of applications in the database and expert systems field, for the exchange of ideas and experiences, and for defining requirements for the future systems in these fields. After the very promising DEXA 90 in Vienna, Austria, we hope to have successfully established wjth this year's DEXA 91 a stage where scientists from diverse fields interested in application-oriented research can present and discuss their work. This year there was a total of more than 250 submitted papers from 28 different countries, in all continents. Only 98 of the papers could be accepted. The collection of papers in these proceedings offers a cross-section of the issues facing the area of databases and expert systems, i.e., topics of basic research interest on one hand and questions occurring when developing applications on the other. Major credit for the success of the conference goes to all of our colleagues who submitted papers for consideration and to those who have organized and chaired the panel sessions. Many persons contributed numerous hours to organize this conference. The names of most of them will appear on the following pages. In particular we wish to thank the Organization Committee Chairmen Johann Gordesch, A Min Tjoa, and Roland Wag ner, who also helped establishing the program. Special thanks also go to Gabriella Wagner and Anke Ruckert. Dimitris Karagiannis General Conference Chairman Contents Conference Committee.

This comprehensive reference to all areas of expert systems and applications, plus advanced related topics, lets you spend your time reading expert systems literature rather than searching for it. It gives you a source of historical perspectives and outlooks on the future of the field. Whether you are a manager, a developer or an end user or researcher, Expert Systems and Related Topics: Selected Bibliography & Guide to Information Sources puts all the sources of expert systems literature at your fingertips.

Use and development of database and expert systems can be found in all fields of computer science. The aim of this book is to present a large spectrum of already implemented or just being developed database and expert systems. Contributions cover new requirements, concepts for implementations (e.g. languages, models, storage structures), management of meta data, system architectures, and experiences gained by using traditional databases in as many areas of applications as possibble (at least in the fields listed). The aim of the book is to inspire a fruitful dialogue between developement in practice, users of database and expert systems, and scientists working in the field.

Intelligent Manufacturing is a new disciplinary field which applies computer science, artificial intelligence, mechanical engineering and systems science to industrial manufacturing processes. This book presents a new integration architecture for implementing real-time distributed intelligent manufacturing systems.

We hope that all readers will find the papers included in this volume of interest. All were presented at the 14th BCS IRSG Research Colloquium held at Lancaster University on 13th-14th April 1992. The papers display very well the scope and breadth of information retrieval, as indeed did the workshop ilself. They also present a good cross-section of current IR research, and as such provide a useful signpost for trends in information retrieval. Before we finish we must thank the following colleagues: Simon Botley, Paul Rayson and Paul Jones for their help in the organization of the conference. We would also like to extend a special message of thanks to Professor G.N. Leech of the Department of Linguistics at Lancaster and Roger Garside of the Department of Computing at Lancaster for their support during the conference period. Tony McEnery would also like to express his thanks and gratitude to Paul Baker for his help during the production of this book. September 1992 Tony McEnery Chris Paice Contents A Logical Model of Information Retrieval Based on Situation Theory M. La/mas and K. van Rijsbergen ........................................................ .

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications, DEXA 2001, held in Munich, Germany in September 2001. The 93 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 175 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on advanced databases, information retrieval, digital libraries, user interfaces, multimedia databases, workflow aspects, active databases, spatial databases, distributed databases, web aspects, knowledge management aspects, datawarehouses, hypermedia, indexing, object-oriented databases, database queries, and transaction processing.