The fourth international conference on Extending Data Base Technology was held in Cambridge, UK, in March 1994. The biannual EDBT has established itself as the premier European database conference. It provides an international forum for the presentation of new extensions to database technology through research, development, and application. This volume contains the scientific papers of the conference. Following invited papers by C.M. Stone and A. Herbert, it contains 31 papers grouped into sections on object views, intelligent user interface, distributed information servers, transaction management, information systems design and evolution, semantics of extended data models,accessing new media, join algorithms, query optimization, and multimedia databases.

This book presents the refereed proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Extending Database Technology, EDBT'96, held in Avignon, France in March 1996. The 31 full revised papers included were selected from a total of 178 submissions; also included are some industrial-track papers, contributed by partners of several ESPRIT projects. The volume is organized in topical sections on data mining, active databases, design tools, advanced DBMS, optimization, warehousing, system issues, temporal databases, the web and hypermedia, performance, workflow management, database design, and parallel databases.

The Eighth International Conference on Extending Database Technology, EDBT 2002, was held in Prague, Czech Republic, March 25–27, 2002. It marks the 50th anniversary of Charles University’s Faculty of Mathematics and Physics and is the most recent in a series of conferences dedicated to the dissemination and exchange of the latest advances in data management. Previous conferences occurred in Konstanz, Valencia, Avignon, Cambridge, Vienna, and Venice. The topical theme of this year’s conference is Data Management in the New Millennium, which encourages the community to see beyond the management of massive databases by conventional database management systems and to extend database technology to support new services and application areas. The intention is to spur greater interest in more integrated solutions to user problems, which often implies the consideration of data management issues in entire information systems infrastructures. There is data (almost) everywhere, and data access is needed (almost) always and everywhere. New technologies, services, and app- cations that involve the broader notion of data management are emerging more rapidly than ever, and the database community has much to o?er. The call for papers attracted numerous submissions, including 207 research papers, which is a new record for EDBT. The program committee selected 36 research papers, 6 industrial and applications papers, 13 software demos, and 6 tutorials for presentation at the conference. In addition, the conference program includes three keynote speeches, by Jari Ahola, Ian Horrocks, and Hans-J ̈org Schek, and a panel.

The aim of EFIS 2001, the fourth workshop in the sequence of the international workshops on engineering federated information systems is to intensify the exchange of ideas and experiences between academia and industrial practice. EFIS 2001 was embedded as one part into the major event, Information Federation Week Berlin 2001, including scientific and industrial workshops, demos and discussions for the academic audience as well as for a broader of young and senior practitioners in industry and public services.

This volume contains the proceedings of the 8th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECCOP '94), held in Bologna, Italy in July 1994. ECOOP is the premier European event on object-oriented programming and technology. The 25 full refereed papers presented in the volume were selected from 161 submissions; they are grouped in sessions on class design, concurrency, patterns, declarative programming, implementation, specification, dispatching, and experience. Together with the keynote speech "Beyond Objects" by Luc Steels (Brussels) and the invited paper "Putting Objects to Work" by Norbert A. Streitz (GMD-IPSI, Darmstadt) they offer an exciting perspective on object-oriented programming research and applications.

This volume presents the proceedings of the 5th International Conference Parallel Architectures and Languages Europe (PARLE '94), held in Athens, Greece in July 1994. PARLE is the main Europe-based event on parallel processing. Parallel processing is now well established within the high-performance computing technology and of stategic importance not only to the computer industry, but also for a wide range of applications affecting the whole economy. The 60 full papers and 24 poster presentations accepted for this proceedings were selected from some 200 submissions by the international program committee; they cover the whole field and give a timely state-of-the-art report on research and advanced applications in parallel computing.

Performance evaluation, reliability, and performability are key factors in the development and improvement of computer systems and computer networks. This volume contains the 25 accepted and invited papers presented at the 7th International Conference on Modelling Techniques and Tools for Computer Performance Evaluation. The papers focus on new techniques and the extension of existing techniques for performance and reliability analysis. Tools to support performance and reliability modelling and measurement in all kinds of applications and environments are presented, and the practicability and generality of the approaches are emphasized. The volume summarizes the state of the art and points out future demands and challenges, and will interest both scientists and practitioners.

This volume is the proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on the Mathematical Foundations of Programming Semantics, held in New Orleans in April 1993. The focus of the conference series is the semantics of programming languages and the mathematics which supports the study of the semantics. The semantics is basically denotation. The mathematics may be classified as category theory, lattice theory, or logic. Recent conferences and workshops have increasingly emphasized applications of the semantics and mathematics. The study of the semantics develops with the mathematics and the mathematics is inspired by the applications in semantics. The volume presents current research in denotational semantics and applications of category theory, logic, and lattice theory to semantics.

The Next Generation Information Technologies and Systems (NGITS) wo- shop series is a biannual event held in Israel since 1993. Like its predecessors, NGITS’99 brings together active members of the international research com- nity interested in information technology and knowledge based systems. Many of the base technologies in the traditional areas of database management systems, information retrieval, and resource optimization, are being deployed nowadays in novel systems and applications that ?ourish with the astonishing increase in computational power, storage capacity, communication, and - of course - the advent of the world-wide web. These new fronts, in turn, present an ever gr- ing set of challenges to the technologies, such as data availability, information integrity, and knowledge extraction, fuelling an exciting set of activities. Our workshop clearly re?ects this trend, o?ering a rich sample of the state of the art at the close of the millennium and a glimpse of what is to come in the next one. In response to the call for papers, we received 34 high quality submissions, 22 of which were carefully selected by the Program Committee for presentation at the workshop and inclusion in these proceedings. These include 17 full length papers as well as 5 short papers (that will be accompanied by demonstrations during the workshop). In addition, it is our pleasure to feature two invited talks, given by Professor J. Ullman of Stanford University and IBM Fellow C. Mohan.

The study of planetary or solar magnetic fields explains natural magnetism as a phenomenon of magnetohydrodynamics. The kinematic dynamo theory, especially the fast dynamo treated in this volume, is somewhat simpler but still it presents formidable analytical problems related to chaotic dynamics, for example. This remarkable book presents the status of the theory, including techniques of numerical simulations and modelling, along with a summary of results to date. The first three chapters introduce the problem and present examples of fast dynamo action in flows and maps. The remaining nine chapters deal with various analytical approaches and model systems. The book addresses astronomers and geophysicists, researchers and students alike.