In the last three decades information modelling and knowledge bases have become essentially important subjects not only in academic communities related to information systems and computer science but also in the business area where information technology is applied.

The series of International Conference on Information Modelling and Knowledge Bases (EJC) originally started as a co-operation initiative between Japan and Finland in 1982. The practical operations were then organized by professor Ohsuga in Japan and professors Hannu Kangassalo and Hannu Jaakkola in Finland (Nordic countries). Geographical scope has expanded to cover Europe and recently also other countries. Because of that “European Japanese” in the title of the conference was replaced by “International” in 2014. Workshop characteristic – discussion, enough time for presentations and limited number of participants (50) / papers (30) – is typical for the conference.

The main topics of EJC conferences target a variety of themes. First theme is conceptual modelling including modelling and specification languages, domain-specific conceptual modelling, concepts, concept theories and ontologies, conceptual modelling of large and heterogeneous systems, conceptual modelling of spatial, temporal and biological data and methods for developing, validating and communicating conceptual models.

An important subject is also knowledge and information modelling and discovery covering knowledge discovery, knowledge representation and knowledge management, advanced data mining and analysis methods, conceptions of knowledge and information, modelling information requirements, intelligent information systems as well as information recognition and information modelling.

One of the main themes is linguistic modelling with models of HCI, information delivery to users, intelligent informal querying, linguistic foundation of information and knowledge, fuzzy linguistic models and philosophical and linguistic foundations of conceptual models.

Much attention is also paid to cross-cultural communication and social computing including cross-cultural support systems, integration, evolution and migration of systems, collaborative societies, multicultural web-based software systems, intercultural collaboration and support systems, moreover, social computing, behavioral modeling and prediction.

One of the latest topics is environmental modelling and engineering covering environmental information systems (architecture), spatial, temporal and observational information systems, large-scale environmental systems, collaborative knowledge base systems, agent concepts and conceptualization along with hazard prediction, prevention and steering systems.

Current theme is also multimedia data modelling and systems with modelling multimedia information and knowledge, content-based multimedia data management, content-based multimedia retrieval, privacy and context enhancing technologies, semantics and pragmatics of multimedia data as well as metadata for multimedia information systems.

Overall we received 56 submissions. After careful evaluation, 16 papers have been selected as long paper, 17 papers as short papers, 5 papers as position papers, and 3 papers for presentation of perspective challenges. The long and short papers are included in the book. One additional paper reports the results of a panel session of the conference.

We thank all colleagues for their support of this issue of the EJC conference, especially the program committee, the organizing committee, and the program coordination team. The long and the short papers presented in the conference are revised after the conference and published in the Series of “Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence” by IOS Press (Amsterdam). The books “Information Modelling and Knowledge Bases” are edited by the Editing Committee of the conference.

We believe that the conference will be productive and fruitful in the advance of research and application of information modelling and knowledge bases.

The Editors

Bernhard Thalheim

Hannu Jaakkola

Yasushi Kiyoki

Naofumi Yoshida