The Eighth International Baltic Conference on Databases and Information Systems (Baltic DB&IS'2008) took place on June 2–5 2008 in Tallinn. This conference is continuing a series of successful bi-annual Baltic conferences on databases and information systems, which have been held in Trakai (1994), Tallinn (1996, 2002), Riga (1998, 2004), and Vilnius (2000, 2006).

The conference was organised by the Institute of Cybernetics at Tallinn University of Technology and the Department of Computer Engineering of Tallinn University of Technology in co-operation with the Estonian Informatics Centre (Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications of Estonia).

The aim of the Baltic DB&IS series of conferences is to provide a wide international forum for academics and practitioners in the field of databases and modern information systems for exchanging their achievements in this area. The objective of the conference is to bring together researchers as well as practitioners and PhD students to present their work and exchange ideas, and trigger co-operation.

The International Programme Committee had representatives from 22 countries all over the world. They received 43 submissions from 12 countries. Each conference paper was reviewed by three referees from different countries. As a result, 29 regular papers were accepted for presentation at the conference. From the presented papers, 22 best papers were selected and are included in this volume.

The original research results presented in the conference papers mostly belong to novel fields of IS and database research such as database technology and semantic web, ontology-based IS, IS and AI technologies, IS integration. The invited talk by Dr. Jari Palomäki showed how different ontological commitments affect the way we are modeling the world when creating an information system.

As semantic technologies have been gaining more attention recently, then special session on semantic interoperability of IS was organised. The invited talks from each Baltic State gave a good insight how semantic interoperability initiatives are developing in each of the Baltic States and how they relate to the European semantic interoperability framework. Two of these papers are included in this book.

Finally, we would like to thank the authors for their contributions and the invited speakers for sharing with us their views. We are very grateful to members of the Programme Committee and the additional referees for carefully reviewing the submissions.

We wish to thank all the organising team and our sponsors, who have made this conference and proceedings possible. We express our special thanks to Mr. T. Robal for technical editing of the proceedings. Last, but not least, we thank all the participants, who really made the conference.

September 2008

Hele-Mai Haav, Ahto Kalja