Information Modelling and Knowledge Bases XVIII: Volume 154 Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications : 9781586037109

In the last decades information modelling and knowledge bases have become hot topics not only in academic communities related to information systems and computer science but also in business areas where information technology is applied.

The 16th European-Japanese Conference on Information Modelling and Knowledge Bases EJC 2006 continues the series of events that originally started as a co-operation between Japan and Finland as far back as the late 1980’s. Later (1991) the geographical scope of these conferences expanded to cover all of Europe as well as countries outside Europe other than Japan.

The EJC conferences constitute a world-wide research forum for the exchange of scientific results and experiences achieved in computer science and other related disciplines using innovative methods and progressive approaches. In this way a platform has been established drawing together researches as well as practitioners dealing with information modelling and knowledge bases. Thus the main topics of the EJC conferences target the variety of themes in the domain of information modelling, conceptual analysis, design and specification of information systems, ontologies, software engineering, knowledge and process management, data and knowledge bases. We also aim at applying new progressive theories. To this end much attention is being paid also to theoretical disciplines including cognitive science, artificial intelligence, logic, linguistics and analytical philosophy.

In order to achieve the EJC targets, an international programme committee selected 13 full papers, 5 short papers, 2 position papers and 8 poster papers in the course of a rigorous reviewing process including 33 submissions. The selected papers cover many areas of information modelling, namely theory of concepts, database semantics, knowledge representation, software engineering, WWW information management, context-based information retrieval, ontological technology, image databases, temporal and spatial databases, document data management, process management, and many others.