The three volume set LNAI 4692, LNAI 4693, and LNAI 4694, constitute the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems, KES 2007, held in Vietri sul Mare, Italy, September 12-14, 2007.

The 409 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from about 1203 submissions. The papers present a wealth of original research results from the field of intelligent information processing in the broadest sense; topics covered in the first volume are artificial neural networks and connectionists systems, fuzzy and neuro-fuzzy systems, evolutionary computation, machine learning and classical AI, agent systems, knowledge based and expert systems, hybrid intelligent systems, miscellaneous intelligent algorithms, intelligent vision and image processing, knowledge management and ontologies, Web intelligence, multimedia, e-learning and teaching, intelligent signal processing, control and robotics, other intelligent systems applications, papers of the experience management and engineering workshop, industrial applications of intelligent systems, as well as information engineering and applications in ubiquotous computing environments.

th The 13 edition of the International Conference on Reliable Software Technologies (Ada-Europe 2008) marked its arrival in Italy by selecting the splendid venue of Venice. It did so after having been hosted twice in Switzerland, Spain and the UK (Montreux for its inauguration in 1996 and Geneva in 2007; Santander in 1999 and Palma de Mallorca in 2004; London in 1997 and York in 2005), and having visited Sweden (Uppsala, 1998), Germany (Potsdam, 2000), Belgium (Leuven, 2001), Austria (Vienna, 2002), France (Toulouse, 2003) and Portugal (Porto, 2006). It was certainly high time that the conference came to Italy! The conference series, which is run and sponsored by Ada-Europe, chooses its yearly venue following two driving criteria: to celebrate the activity of one of its national member societies in a particular country, and/or to facilitate the formation, or the growth, of a national community around all aspects of reliable software technologies. The success of this year's conference, beside the richness of its technical and social program, will thus be measured by its lasting effects. We can only hope that the latter will be as good and vast as the former! Owing to the absence of a national society associated with Ada-Europe in Italy, the organization of the conference was technically sustained by selected members of the Board of Ada-Europe, its governing body, with some invaluable local support.

Researchers and professionals in the relevant fields will find this book a must-read, as it defines the leading edge of current research into conceptual structures. It constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Conceptual Structures, held in Sheffield, UK in July 2007. With almost 50 papers contained in its 500 pages, it includes a special focus on the application of conceptual structures in business and technological settings and is organized into topical sections for ease of reference.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Automated Reasoning with Analytic Tableaux and Related Methods, TABLEAUX 2007, held in Aix en Provence, France in July 2007.

The 14 revised research papers presented together with 2 system descriptions as well as 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 43 submissions. The papers cover many topics in the wide range of logics; from intuitionistic and substructural logics to modal logics (including temporal and dynamic logics), from many-valued logics to nonmonotonic logics, from classical first-order logic to description logics. Some contributions are focused on decision procedures, others on efficient reasoning, as well as on implementation of theorem provers. A few papers explore applications such as model-checking, verification, or knowledge engineering. Finally some contributions make use of tableaux as a tool for theoretical investigation of logics.

The two-volume set LNCS 4527 and LNCS 4528 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Work-Conference on the Interplay between Natural and Artificial Computation, IWINAC 2007, held in La Manga del Mar Menor, Spain in June 2007.

The 126 revised papers presented are thematically divided into two volumes; the first includes all the contributions mainly related with theoretical, conceptual and methodological aspects linking AI and knowledge engineering with neurophysiology, clinics and cognition. The second volume contains all the contributions connected with biologically inspired methods and techniques for solving AI and knowledge engineering problems in different application domains.

The two-volume set LNCS 4527 and LNCS 4528 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Work-Conference on the Interplay between Natural and Artificial Computation, IWINAC 2007, held in La Manga del Mar Menor, Spain in June 2007.

The 126 revised papers presented are thematically divided into two volumes; the first includes all the contributions mainly related with theoretical, conceptual and methodological aspects linking AI and knowledge engineering with neurophysiology, clinics and cognition. The second volume contains all the contributions connected with biologically inspired methods and techniques for solving AI and knowledge engineering problems in different application domains.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the Second International Conference on Topic Map Research and Applications, TMRA 2006, held in Leipzig, Germany in October 2006.

The 15 revised full papers and 6 revised short papers presented together with 1 invited lecture were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvement from a total of 52 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections headed creation and visualization of topic maps, applied topic maps in industry, administration and sciences, standards related research, leveraging the semantics, technical issues of topic mapping, and social software with topic maps.

This book contains a selection of papers presented at the International Seminar "Negotiation and Market Engineering," held at Dagstuhl Castle, Germany, in November 2006.

The 17 revised full papers presented in this volume were carefully selected and reviewed after the seminar. The papers deal with the complexity of negotiations, auctions, and markets as economic, social, and IT systems. The authors give a broad overview on the major issues to be addressed and the methodologies used to approach them, covering highly interdisciplinary research from computer science, economics, business administration, and mathematics.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Conference on Spatial Cognition, Spatial Cognition 2006, held in Bremen, Germany, September 24-28, 2006.

The 28 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 59 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on Spatial Reasoning, Human-Robot Interaction, Visuo-Spatial Reasoning and Spatial Dynamics, Spatial Concepts, Human Memory, Mental Reasoning and Assistance, Spatial Concepts, Human Memory and Mental Reasoning, Navigation, Wayfinding and Route Instructions as well as Linguistic and Social Issues in Spatial Knowledge Processing.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management, EKAW 2006, held in Podebrady, Czech Republic in October 2006. The 17 revised full papers and 16 revised short papers presented together with two invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 119 submissions.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th European Conference on Case-Based Reasoning, ECCBR 2004, held in Fethiye, Turkey in September 2006. The book presents 31 revised full papers and 5 revised application papers together with 2 invited papers and 2 abstracts of invited talks. The coverage represents snapshot of current current issues in case-based reasoning, ranging from theoretical and methodological issues to advanced applications in various fields.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Cooperative Information Agents, CIA 2006, held in Edinburgh, UK in September 2006. The 29 revised full papers presented together with four invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 58 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 20th Annual Working Conference on Data and Applications Security held in Sophia Antipolis, France, in July/August 2006.

The 22 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 56 submissions. The papers present theory, technique, applications, and practical experience of data and application security covering a number of diverse research topics such as access control, privacy, and identity management.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 2006 Pacific Rim Knowledge Acquisition Workshop, PKAW 2006, held in Guilin, China in August 2006 as part of 9th Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, PRICAI 2006.

The 21 revised full papers and 6 revised short papers presented together with 4 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 81 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on ontology and knowledge acquisition, algorithm approaches to knowledge acquisition, incremental knowledge acquisition and RDR, knowledge acquisition and applications, as well as machine learning and data mining.

This book constitutes the post-proceedings of the Third International Computer Music Modeling and Retrieval Symposium, CMMR 2005. The 24 revised full papers address a broad variety of topics, organized in topical sections on sound synthesis; music perception and cognition; interactive music: interface, interaction, gestures and sensors, music composition; music retrieval; music performance, music analysis, music representation; as well as interdisciplinarity and computer music.

This book constitutes the refereed post-proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Construction and Analysis of Safe, Secure, and Interoperable Smart Devices, CASSIS 2005. The 9 revised full papers presented were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvement from about 30 workshop talks. The papers are organized in topical sections on research trends in smart devices, Web services, virtual machine technology, security, validation and formal methods, proof-carrying code, and embedded devices.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Hybrid Metaheuristics, HM 2006, held in Gran Canaria, Spain, in October 2006. The 13 revised full papers presented together with one invited paper were carefully reviewed and selected from 42 submissions.

An Introduction to Knowledge Engineering presents a simple but detailed exp- ration of current and established work in the ?eld of knowledge-based systems and related technologies. Its treatment of the increasing variety of such systems is designed to provide the reader with a substantial grounding in such techno- gies as expert systems, neural networks, genetic algorithms, case-based reasoning systems, data mining, intelligent agents and the associated techniques and meth- ologies. The material is reinforced by the inclusion of numerous activities that provide opportunities for the reader to engage in their own research and re?ection as they progress through the book. In addition, self-assessment questions allow the student to check their own understanding of the concepts covered. The book will be suitable for both undergraduate and postgraduate students in computing science and related disciplines such as knowledge engineering, arti?cial intelligence, intelligent systems, cognitive neuroscience, robotics and cybernetics. vii Contents Foreword vii 1 An Introduction to Knowledge Engineering. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Section 1: Data, Information and Knowledge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Section 2: Skills of a Knowledge Engineer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Section 3: An Introduction to Knowledge-Based Systems. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 2 Types of Knowledge-Based Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 Section 1: Expert Systems. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Section 2: Neural Networks. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 Section 3: Case-Based Reasoning. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 Section 4: Genetic Algorithms. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 Section 5: Intelligent Agents. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 Section 6: Data Mining . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 3 Knowledge Acquisition. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 4 Knowledge Representation and Reasoning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108 Section 1: Using Knowledge. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 Section 2: Logic, Rules and Representation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116 Section 3: Developing Rule-Based Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126 Section 4: Semantic Networks. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The European Conference on Machine Learning (ECML) and the European Conference on Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (PKDD) were jointly organized this year for the ?fth time in a row, after some years of mutual independence before. After Freiburg (2001), Helsinki (2002), Cavtat (2003) and Pisa (2004), Porto received the 16th edition of ECML and the 9th PKDD in October 3-7. Having the two conferences together seems to be working well: 585 di?erent paper submissions were received for both events, which maintains the high s- mission standard of last year. Of these, 335 were submitted to ECML only, 220 to PKDD only and 30 to both. Such a high volume of scienti?c work required a tremendous e?ort from Area Chairs, Program Committee members and some additional reviewers. On average, PC members had 10 papers to evaluate, and Area Chairs had 25 papers to decide upon. We managed to have 3 highly qua- ?edindependentreviewsperpaper(withveryfewexceptions)andoneadditional overall input from one of the Area Chairs. After the authors' responses and the online discussions for many of the papers, we arrived at the ?nal selection of 40 regular papers for ECML and 35 for PKDD. Besides these, 32 others were accepted as short papers for ECML and 35 for PKDD. This represents a joint acceptance rate of around 13% for regular papers and 25% overall. We thank all involved for all the e?ort with reviewing and selection of papers. Besidesthecoretechnicalprogram, ECMLandPKDDhad6invitedspeakers, 10 workshops, 8 tutorials and a Knowledge Discovery Challenge.

Here are the proceedings of the Third International Joint Conference on Automated Reasoning, IJCAR 2006, held in Seattle, Washington, USA, August 2006. The book presents 41 revised full research papers and 8 revised system descriptions, with 3 invited papers and a summary of a systems competition. The papers are organized in topical sections on proofs, search, higher-order logic, proof theory, proof checking, combination, decision procedures, CASC-J3, rewriting, and description logic.

Dear delegates, friendsand membersofthe growingKES professionalcommunity, w- come to the proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Knowledge-Based and IntelligentInformationandEngineeringSystemshostedbyLa TrobeUniversityin M- bourne Australia. The KES conference series has been established for almost a decade, and it cont- ues each year to attract participants from all geographical areas of the world, including Europe, the Americas, Australasia and the Paci?c Rim. The KES conferences cover a wide range of intelligent systems topics. The broad focus of the conference series is the theory and applications of intelligent systems. From a pure research ?eld, intel- gent systems have advanced to the point where their abilities have been incorporated into many business and engineering application areas. KES 2005 provided a valuable mechanism for delegates to obtain an extensive view of the latest research into a range of intelligent-systems algorithms, tools and techniques. The conference also gave de- gates the chance to come into contact with those applying intelligent systems in diverse commercial areas. The combination of theory and practice represented a unique opp- tunity to gain an appreciation of the full spectrum of leading-edge intelligent-systems activity. The papers for KES 2005 were either submitted to invited sessions, chaired and organized by respected experts in their ?elds, or to a general session, managed by an extensive International Program Committee, or to the Intelligent Information Hiding and Multimedia Signal Processing (IIHMSP) Workshop, managed by an International Workshop Technical Committe

The International Conference on Case-Based Reasoning (ICCBR) is the p- eminent international meeting on case-based reasoning (CBR). ICCBR 2005 (http: //www.iccbr.org/iccbr05/) was the sixth in this series of biennial - ternationalconferenceshighlightingthemostsigni?cantcontributionstothe?eld of CBR. The conference took place during August 23-26, 2005 at the downtown campus of DePaul University, in the heart of Chicago's downtown "Loop." P- vious ICCBR conferences were held in Trondheim, Norway (2003), Vancouver, Canada (2001), Seeon, Germany(1999), Providence, Rhode Island, USA (1997), and Sesimbra, Portugal (1995). Day 1 of ICCBR 2005 was Industry Day, which provided real-world expe- ences utilizing CBR in ?elded applications.Day 2 featuredvarious workshopson CBR in the health sciences, textual case-based reasoning, computer gaming and simulation environments, and similarities - Processes- Work?ows.Days 3 and4 comprisedpresentationsandpostersontheoreticalandappliedCBRresearch, as well as invited talks from three distinguished scholars: Derek Bridge, University College Cork, Craig Knoblock, University of Southern California, and Colleen Seifert, University of Michigan. The presentationsand posterscovereda wide rangeof CBR topics, including adaptation, applications, case base maintenance, computer games, creative r- soning, knowledge representation, interactive systems, knowledge management, knowledgeacquisition, multiagentcollaborativesystems, similarity, tutorings- tems, bioinformatics, and textual CBR.

DEXA 2005, the 16th International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications, was held at the Copenhagen Business School, Copenhagen, Denmark, from August 22 to 26, 2005. The success of the DEXA series has partly been due to the way in which it has kept abreast of recent developments by spawning specialized workshops and conferences each with its own proceedings. In 2005 the DEXA programme was co-located with the 7th International Conference on Data Warehousing and Knowledge Discovery [DaWaK 2005], the 6th International Conference on Electronic Commerce and Web Technologies [EC-Web 2005], the 4th International Conference on Electronic Government [EGOV 2005], the 2nd International Conference on Trust, Privacy, and Security in Digital Business [TrustBus 2005], the 2nd International Conference on Industrial Applications of Holonic and Multi-agent Systems [HoloMAS 2005], as well as 19 specialized workshops. These proceedings are the result of a considerable amount of hard work. Beginning with the preparation of submitted papers, the papers went through the reviewing process. This process was supported by online discussion between the reviewers to determine the final conference program. The authors of accepted papers revised their manuscripts to produce this fine collection. DEXA 2005 received 390 submissions, and from those the Program Committee selected the 92 papers in these proceedings. This year the reviewing process generated more than 1000 referee reports. The hard work of the authors, the referees and the Program Committee is gratefully acknowledged.

This volume contains invited and contributed papers presented at the 9th International Summer School "Neural Nets E.R. Caianiello" on Nonlinear Speech Processing: Al- rithms and Analysis, held in Vietri sul Mare, Salerno, Italy, during September 13-18, 2004. The aim of this book is to provide primarily high-level tutorial coverage of the ?elds related to nonlinear methods for speech processing and analysis, including new approaches aimed at improving speech applications. Fourteen surveys are offered by specialists in the ?eld. Consequently, the volume may be used as a reference book on nonlinear methods for speech processing and an- ysis. Also included are ?fteen papers that present original contributions in the ?eld and complete the tutorials. The volume is divided into ?ve sections: Dealing with Nonlinearities in Speech S- nal, Acoustic-to-Articulatory Modeling of Speech Phenomena, Data Driven and Speech Processing Algorithms, Algorithms and Models Based on Speech Perception Mec- nisms, and Task-Oriented Speech Applications. Dealing with Nonlinearities in Speech Signals is an introductory section where n- linear aspects of the speech signal are introduced from three different points of view. The section includes three papers. The ?rst paper, authored by Anna Esposito and Maria Marinaro, is an attempt to introduce the concept of nonlinearity revising several nonl- ear phenomena observed in the acoustics, the production and the perception of speech. Also discussed is the engineering endeavor to model these phenomena.

This book introduces major agent platforms, frameworks, systems, tools, and applications. Each system is described by their developers in sufficient detail so that the reader can get a good understanding of the architecture, functionality, and application areas of the system. All systems are running systems. One main focus of the book lies on agent platforms and toolkits. They form the basis for the development of agent-based systems, thus, are a convenient starting point for everybody who wants to apply agent technology. Another focus lies on agent-based applications. These systems prove that agent technology is mature enough to permit the development of sophisticated applications, like electronic marketplaces, environments for computer-supported cooperative work, or transportation systems.