Information modelling and knowledge bases are becoming very important topics not only in academic communities related to information systems and computer science but also in the business field of information technology.

Currently, the structural complexity of information resources, the variety of abstraction levels of information, and the size of databases and knowledge bases are continuously growing. We are facing the complex problems of structuring, sharing, managing, searching and mining data and knowledge from a large amount of complex information resources existing in databases and knowledge bases. New methodologies in many areas of information modelling and knowledge bases are expected to provide sophisticated and reliable solutions to these problems.

The aim of this series of Information Modelling and Knowledge Bases is to provide research communities in information modelling and knowledge bases with scientific results and experiences achieved by using innovative methodologies in computer science and other disciplines related to linguistics, philosophy, and psychology.

Those interdisciplinary research results include common interests in understanding and solving problems on information modelling and knowledge bases, as well as applying those research results to the practical application areas.

The research topics in this series are mainly concentrated on a variety of themes in the important domains:

• theoretical and philosophical basis of concept modelling and conceptual modelling,

• conceptual modelling, information modelling and specification,

• conceptual models in intelligent activity,

• collections of data, knowledge, and descriptions of concepts,

• human-computer interaction and modelling,

• database and knowledge base systems,

• software engineering and modelling and

• applications for information modelling and knowledge bases.

It is very significant to recognize, study and share new areas related to information modelling and knowledge bases on which great attention is focused. Therefore, cognitive science, knowledge management, linguistics, philosophy, psychology, logic, and management science are relevant areas, too. This is reflected in the number of research results dealing with multimedia databases, WWW information managements, and temporal-spatial data models. These new directions are pushing the frontier of knowledge and creating novel ways of modelling real worlds.

To achieve these aims in this series, the international program committee has selected 16 full papers, 11 short papers and 1 position paper in a rigorous reviewing process from 38 submissions.

The selected papers cover many areas of information modelling, concept theories, database semantics, knowledge bases and systems, software engineering, WWW information managements, context-based information access spaces, ontological technology, image databases, temporal and spatial databases, document data managements, and many more.

In Program Committee, there were 32 well-known researchers from the areas of information modelling, concept theories, conceptual modelling, database theory, knowledge bases, information systems, linguistics, philosophy, logic, image processing, temporal and spatial databases, document data managements and other related fields. We are very grateful for their great work in reviewing the papers.

We hope that the series of Information Modelling and Knowledge Base will be productive and valuable in the advancement of research and practice of those academic areas.

The Editors, Yasushi Kiyoki, Jaak Henno, Hannu Jaakkola, Hannu Kangassalo