The objective of the workshops associated with ER 2001, the 20th International Con- rence on Conceptual Modeling, was to give participants the opportunity to present and discuss emerging hot topics, thus adding new perspectives to conceptual modeling. This, the 20th ER conference, the ?rst of the 21st century, was also the ?rst one in Japan. The conference was held on November 27-30, 2001 at Yokohama National University with 192 participants from 31 countries. ER 2001 encompasses the entire spectrum of c- ceptual modeling, from theoretical aspects to implementations, including fundamentals, applications, and software engineering. In particular, ER 2001 emphasized e-business and reengineering. To meet this objective, we selected the following four topics and planned four international workshops: – International Workshop on Conceptual Modeling of Human/Organizational/Social Aspects of Manufacturing Activities (HUMACS 2001) Manufacturing enterprises have to confront a host of demands. The competitive climate, enhanced by communication and knowledge sharing, will require incr- singly rapid responses to market forces. Customer demands for higher quality, better services, and lower cost will force manufacturers to reach new levels of ?exibility and adaptability. Sophisticated customers will demand products customized to meet their needs. Industries have so far sought to cope with these challenges primarily through advances in traditional capital by installing more powerful hardware and software technology. Attention to the role of humans combined with organizational and social schemes in manufacturing has only been marginal. The workshop HUMACS 2001 aimed to challenge the relevance of this last point.

This book constitutes the refereed joint proceedings of five international workshops held in conjunction with the 24th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling, ER 2005, in Klagenfurt, Austria, in October 2005. The 40 revised full papers presented together with the abstracts of seven tutorials were carefully reviewed and selected from 102 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on best practices of UML, experience reports and new applications, model evaluation and requirements modeling, metamodeling and model driven development, positions in engineering agent oriented systems, agent oriented methodologies and conceptual modeling, agent communication and coordination, geographic information systems, spatial and spatio-temporal data representation, spatial relations, spatial queries, analysis and data mining, data modeling and visualisation, conceptual modeling approaches for e-business, information system models quality, and quality driven processes.

The objective of the workshops held in conjunction with ER 2002, the 21st International Conference on Conceptual Modeling, was to give participants the opportunitytopresentanddiscussemerginghottopics,thusaddingnewpersp- tives to conceptual modeling. To meet this objective, we selected the following four workshops: – 2nd InternationalWorkshop on Evolution and Changein Data Management (ECDM 2002) – ER/IFIP8. 1 Workshop on Conceptual Modelling Approaches to Mobile - formation Systems Development (MobIMod 2002) – International Workshop on Conceptual Modeling Quality (IWCMQ 2002) – 3rd International Joint Workshop on Conceptual Modeling Approaches for E-business: a Web Service Perspective (eCOMO 2002) ER 2002 was organized so that there would be no overlap between the c- ference sessions and the workshops. This proceedings contains workshop papers that wererevisedby the authors following discussions during the conference. We are deeply indebted to the members of the organizing committees and program committees of these workshops for their hard work. July 2003 Antoni Oliv ́ e, Masatoshi Yoshikawa, and Eric S. K. Yu Workshop Co-chairs ER 2002 ECDM 2002 Change is a fundamental but sometimes neglected aspect of information and database systems. The management of evolution and change and the ability of database, information and knowledge-based systems to deal with change is an essential component in developing and maintaining truly useful systems. Many approachestohandlingevolutionandchangehavebeenproposedinvariousareas of data management, and this forum seeks to bring together researchers and practitioners from both more established areas and from emerging areas to look at this issue.

Innovative tools and techniques for the development and design of software systems are essential to the problem solving and planning of software solutions. Software Design and Development: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications brings together the best practices of theory and implementation in the development of software systems. This reference source is essential for researchers, engineers, practitioners, and scholars seeking the latest knowledge on the techniques, applications, and methodologies for the design and development of software systems.

"This book brings together a comprehensive collection on commercial, government or societal exploitation of the Internet and ICT, representing cutting edge research from over 30 countries. The issues, applications and case studies presented facilitate knowledge sharing, which is key to addressing global eAdoption issues and the Digital Divide. It can be sued to benchmark regional and national developments, avoid previous mistakes and identify potential partners and exploitation opportunities." -- Preface.

This volume contains a collection of selected papers presented at the Symposium on Conceptual Modeling, which was held in Los Angeles, California, on December 2, th 1997, immediately before the 16 International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER’97), which was held at UCLA. A total of eighteen papers were selected for inclusion in this volume. These papers are written by experts in the conceptual modeling area and represent the most current thinking of these experts. This volume also contains the summaries of three workshops that were held on 6 7 December 1997, immediately after the ER’97 conference at UCLA. The topics of these three workshops are: • Behavioral Modeling • Conceptual Modeling in Multimedia Information Seeking • What Is the Role of Cognition in Conceptual Modeling? Since these topics are not only very important but also very timely, we think it is appropriate to include the summary of these three workshops in this volume. Those readers interested in further investigating topics related to the three workshops can either look up the individual paper published on the Web or contact the authors directly. The summary paper by Chen at the beginning of this volume also includes the summary of several interesting speeches at the Symposium.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling, ER 2000, held in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA in October 2000. The 37 revised full papers presented together with three invited papers and eight industrial abstracts were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 140 submitted papers. The book offers topical sections on database integration, temporal and active database modeling, database and data warehouse design techniques, analysis patterns and ontologies, Web-based information systems, business process modeling, conceptual modeling and XML, engineering and multimedia application modeling, object-oriented modeling, applying object-oriented technology, quality in conceptual modeling, and application design using UML.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Biological and Medical Data Analysis, ISBMDA 2004, held in Barcelona, Spain in November 2004. The 50 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on data analysis for image processing, data visualization, decision support systems, information retrieval, knowledge discovery and data mining, statistical methods and tools, time series analysis, data management and analysis in bioinformatics, integration of biological and medical data, metabolic data and pathways, and microarray data analysis and visualization.

This volume contains technical papers and panel position papers selected from the proceedings of the International Symposium on Information Systems and Technologies for Network Society, held together with the IPSJ (information processing society of Japan) National Convention, in September 1997. Papers were submitted from all over the world, especially from Japan, Korea and China. Since these countries are believed to form one of the major computer manufacturing centers in the world, a panel on “Computer Science Education for the 21st Century” was set up. A special session on the Japanese project on Software Engineering invited representative researchers from the project, which is supported by the Ministry of Education, Japan.

For more than 20 years, the series of Conceptual Modeling – ER conferences has provided a forum for research communities and practitioners to present and - change research results and practical experiences in the ?elds of database design and conceptual modeling. Throughout the years, the scope of these conferences has extended from database design and speci?c topics of that area to more u- versal or re?ned conceptual modeling, organizing originally weak or ill-structured information or knowledge in more cultured ways by applying various kinds of principles, abstract models, and theories, for di?erent purposes. At the same time, many technically oriented approaches have been developed which aim to facilitate the implementation of rather advanced conceptual models. Conceptual modeling is based on the process of conceptualization, and it is the core of system structuring as well as justi?cation for information systems development. It supports and facilitates the understanding, explanation, pred- tion, and reasoning on information and knowledge, and their manipulation in the systems, in addition to understanding and designing the functions of the systems. The conceptualization process aims at constructing concepts relevant for the knowledge and information system in question. Concepts in the human mind and concept descriptions in computerized information systems are quite di?erent things by nature, but both should be taken into account in conceptual modeling. Usually concept descriptions are properly observed, but concepts in the human mind and their properties are often neglected quite carelessly.