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.

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.

The 19th Annual IFIP Working Group 11.3 Working Conference on Data and Applications Security was held August 7-10, 2005 at the University of C- necticut in Storrs, Connecticut. The objectives of the working conference were to discuss in depth the current state of the researchand practice in data and - plicationsecurity, enableparticipantstobene?tfrompersonalcontactwithother researchers and expand their knowledge, support the activities of the Working Group, and disseminate the research results. This volume contains the 24 papers that were presented at the working c- ference. These papers, which had been selected from 54 submissions, were rig- ously reviewed by the Working Group members. The volume is o?ered both to document progressand to provideresearcherswith a broadperspective of recent developments in data and application security. A special note of thanks goes to the many volunteers whose e?orts made the working conference a success. We wish to thank Divesh Srivastava for agreeing to deliver the invited talk, Carl Landwehr and David Spooner for organizing the panel, the authors for their worthy contributions, and the referees for their time and e?ort in reviewing the papers. We are grateful to T. C. Ting for serving as the General Chair, Steven Demurjian and Charles E. Phillips, Jr. for their hard work as Local Arrangements Chairs, and Pierangela Samarati, Working Group Chair, for managing the IFIP approval process. We would also like to acknowledge Sabrina De Capitani di Vimercati for managing the conference's Web site.

Started on the inspired initiative of Prof. Alfred Strohmeier back in 1996, and spawned from the annual Ada-Europe conference that had previously run for 16 consecutive years, the International Conference on Reliable Software Technologies celebrated this year its tenth anniversary by going to York, UK, where the ?rst series of technical meetings on Ada were held in the 1970s. Besides being a beautiful and historical place in itself, York also hosts the Depa- ment of Computer Science of the local university, whose Real-Time Group has been tremendously in?uential in shaping the Ada language and in the progress on real-time computing worldwide. This year's conference was therefore put together under exc- lent auspices, in a very important year for the Ada community in view of the forthc- ing completion of the revision process that is upgrading the language standard to face the challenges of the new millennium. The conference took place on June 20-24, 2005. It was as usual sponsored by Ada-Europe, the European federation of national Ada societies, in cooperation with ACM SIGAda. The conference was organized by selected staff of the University of York teamed up with collaborators from various places in Europe, in what turned out to be a very effective instance of distributed collaborative processing. The conference also enjoyed the generous support of 11 industrial sponsors.

The journey towards the autonomous enterprise has begun; there are already companies operating in a highly automated way. Every corporate decision-maker will need to understand the opportunities and risks that the autonomous enterprise presents, to learn how best to navigate the shifting competitive landscape on their journey of change. This book is your guide to this innovation, presenting the concepts in real world contexts by covering the art of the possible today and providing glimpses into the future of business.

WelcometotheproceedingsofPervasive2005, The3rdInternationalConference on Pervasive Computing. We were honored to serve as chairs in this conference series, which was founded in 2002 and is now emerging as one of the most respected venues for publication of research on pervasive and ubiquitous c- puting. The conference is attracting research submissions of very high quality from all over the world, and from researchers representing a variety of disciplines and perspectives. We thank everybody who submitted their papers to Pervasive, demonstrating the extensive work going on in this area; and the Program C- mittee and our external reviewers who spent countless hours providing feedback and guidance in order to create the ?nal program. This year we received 130 submissions. By the end of the review process, we had 566 reviews on ?le, as well as long email discussion threads for each paper. In an initial phase we had each paper reviewed by two members of the Program Committee and two external reviewers. In a second phase, each paper wasdiscussedbyitsfourreviewerstoreachconsensusastoitstechnicalmerit. At the end of this phase, the top-rated papers as well as those that were found to be most controversial were selected for discussion at the PC meeting and reviewed by an additional PC member. The result being that each paper discussed in the PC meeting had 5 reviews and was read by three people who participated in the meeting, leading to a very informed and lively discussion

Cyberspace security is a critical subject of our times.

On one hand the development of Internet, mobile communications, distributed computing, computer software and databases storing essential enterprise information has helped to conduct business and personal communication between individual people. On the other hand it has created many opportunities for abuse, fraud and expensive damage. This book is a selection of the best papers presented at the NATO Advanced Research Workshop dealing with the Subject of Cyberspace Security and Defense. The level of the individual contributions in the volume is advanced and suitable for senior and graduate students, researchers and technologists who wish to get some feeling of the state of the art in several sub-disciplines of Cyberspace security.

Several papers provide a broad-brush description of national security issues and brief summaries of technology states. These papers can be read and appreciated by technically enlightened managers and executives who want to understand security issues and approaches to technical solutions. An important question of our times is not "Should we do something for enhancing our digital assets security," the question is "How to do it."

Embedded systems now include a very large proportion of the advanced products designed in the world, spanning transport (avionics, space, automotive, trains), electrical and electronic appliances (cameras, toys, televisions, home appliances, audio systems, and cellular phones), process control (energy production and distribution, factory automation and optimization), telecommunications (satellites, mobile phones and telecom networks), and security (e-commerce, smart cards), etc. The extensive and increasing use of embedded systems and their integration in everyday products marks a significant evolution in information science and technology. We expect that within a short timeframe embedded systems will be a part of nearly all equipment designed or manufactured in Europe, the USA, and Asia. There is now a strategic shift in emphasis for embedded systems designers: from simply achieving feasibility, to achieving optimality. Optimal design of embedded systems means targeting a given market segment at the lowest cost and delivery time possible. Optimality implies seamless integration with the physical and electronic environment while respecting real-world constraints such as hard deadlines, reliability, availability, robustness, power consumption, and cost. In our view, optimality can only be achieved through the emergence of embedded systems as a discipline in its own right.

It is always a special honor to chair the European Dependable Computing C- ference (EDCC). EDCC has become one of the well-established conferences in the ?eld of dependability in the European research area. Budapest was selected as the host of this conference due to its traditions in organizing international scienti?c events and its traditional role of serving as a meeting point between East and West. EDCC-5 was the ?fth in the series of these high-quality scienti?c conf- ences. In addition to the overall signi?cance of such a pan-European event, this year's conference was a special one due to historic reasons. The roots of EDCC date back to the moment when the Iron Curtain fell. Originally, two groups of scientists from di?erent European countries in Western and Eastern Europe - who were active in research and education related to dependability created a - joint forum in order to merge their communities as early as in 1989. This trend has continued up to today. This year's conference was the ?rst one where the overwhelming majority of the research groups belong to the family of European nations united in the European Union. During the past 16 years we observed that the same roots in all the professional, cultural and scienti?c senses led to a seamless integration of these research communities previously separated ar- ?cially for a long time. EDCC has become one of the main European platforms to exchange new - searchideasinthe?eldofdependability.

This is the fourth volume in a series of books dedicated to basic research in spatial cognition. Spatial cognition is a field that investigates the connection between the physical spatial world and the mental world. Philosophers and researchers have p- posed various views concerning the relation between the physical and the mental worlds: Plato considered pure concepts of thought as separate from their physical manifestations while Aristotle considered the physical and the mental realms as two aspects of the same substance. Descartes, a dualist, discussed the interaction between body and soul through an interface organ and thus introduced a functional view that presented a challenge for the natural sciences and the humanities. In modern psych- ogy, the relation between the physical and the cognitive space has been investigated using thorough experiments, and in artificial intelligence we have seen views as diverse as 'problems can be solved on a representation of the world' and 'a representation of the world is not necessary. ' Today's spatial cognition work establishes a correspondence between the mental and the physical worlds by studying and exploiting their interaction; it investigates how mental space and spatial "reality" join together in understanding the world and in interacting with it. The physical and representational aspects are equally important in this work. Almost all topics of cognitive science manifest themselves in spatial cognition.

This volume contains the ?nal proceedings for the 2004Computer Music Mod- ing and Retrieval Symposium (CMMR 2004). This event was held during 26-29 May 2004 in Esbjerg, Denmark on the joint campus area of Aalborg University Esbjerg and the University of Southern Denmark, Esbjerg. CMMR is an annual event focusing on important aspects of computer music. CMMR 2004 is the s- ond event in this series. CMMR 2003, which was held in Montpellier, France in May 2003, was a great success and attracted high-quality papers and prominent researchers from the ?eld of computer music. The CMMR 2003 postsymposium proceedingswaspublishedbySpringerintheLectureNotesinComputerScience series (LNCS 2771). CMMR 2004 was jointly organized by Aalborg University Esbjerg in Denmark and LMA, CNRS, Marseille in France (in cooperation with ACM SIGWEB). The use of computers in music is well established. CMMR 2004 provided a unique opportunity to meet and interact with peers concerned with the cro- in?uence of the technological and creative in computer music. The ?eld of c- putermusicisinterdisciplinarybynatureandcloselyrelatedtoanumberofc- puter science and engineering areas such as information retrieval, programming, human computer interaction,digital libraries,hypermedia, arti? cialintelligence, acoustics, signal processing, etc. The event gathered many interesting people (researchers, educators, composers, performers, and others). There were many high-qualitykeynoteandpaperpresentations,thatfosteredinspiringdiscussions. I hope that you ?nd the work presented in these proceedings as interesting and exciting as I have.

This book is a collection of papers presented at UCS 2004, held on November 8 9 in Tokyo. UCS is a series of international symposia sponsored by the special interest group Ubiquitous Computing Systems of the Information Processing Society of Japan. The ?rst UCS was held on November 17, 2003 in Kyoto. It was held as an invitation-based symposium. UCS 2004 was the second of the series, and the ?rst submission-based conference. UCS focuses on the emerging researcharea of ubiquitous computing systems. This emergence is an outcome of the rapid evolution in smart appliances and devices, as well as tremendous advances in wireless networks and mobile c- puting.Inthelastfewyears, variousapplicationsofinformationtechnologyhave been changing our everyday life rapidly and to a large extent. The best ex- ple is the use of mobile phones. By getting new sensing devices, cameras, their application ?eld is no longer limited to communication but covers data c- munications including Internet access, and data and program up-/downloading, and so on. The symposium o?ered the opportunity for in-depth exploration of the most recent research and development ?ndings in the ?eld of ubiquitous computing. The submitted papers presented at UCS 2004 suggest such a direction to future technologies, including mobile ad hoc networks, sensor networks and conte- aware technologies."

This volume of the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science series contains the contributions presented at the International Symposium on Knowledge Exploration in Life Science Informatics (KELSI 2004) held in Milan, Italy, 25 26 November 2004. The two main objectives of the symposium were: To explore the symbiosis between information and knowledge technologies and v- ious life science disciplines, such as biochemistry, biology, neuroscience, medical research, social sciences, and so on. To investigate the synergy among different life science informatics areas, including cheminformatics, bioinformatics, neuroinformatics, medical informatics, systems - ology, socionics, and others. Modern life sciences investigate phenomena and systems at the level of molecules, cells, tissues, organisms, and populations. Typical areas of interest include natural e- lution, development, disease, behavior, cognition, and consciousness.This quest is g- eratinganoverwhelmingandfast-growingamountofdata, information, andknowledge, re?ecting living systems at different levels of organization. Future progress of the life sciences will depend on effective and ef?cient management, sharing, and exploitation of these resources by computational means."

Following the previous four annual conferences, the 5th Chinese Conference on Biometrics Recognition (Sinobiometrics 2004) was held in Guangzhou, China in December 2004. The conference this year was aimed at promoting the international exchange of ideas and providing an opportunity for keeping abreast of the latest developments in biometric algorithms, systems, and applications. The 1st Biometrics Verification Competition (BVC) on face, iris, and fingerprint recognition was also conducted in conjunction with the conference. This book is composed of 74 papers presented at Sinobiometrics 2004, contributed by researchers and industrial practitioners from Korea, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, France, UK, US, as well as China. Of these, 60 papers were selected from 140 submissions and 14 were invited. The papers not only presented recent technical advances, but also addressed issues in biometric system design, standardization, and applications. Included among the invited were four feature papers on the ideas and algorithms of the best-performing biometric engines, which were either competition winners at the Face Authentication Test (FAT) 2004 or the Fingerprint Verification Competition (FVC) 2004, or they were the best-performing iris and palmprint recognition algorithms. The papers were complemented by five keynote lectures on biometrics, and face, fingerprint, and iris authentication and multimodal fusion by Arun Ross (West Virginia University) and Anil K. Jain (Michigan State University), Josef Kittler (University of Surrey), John Daugman (University of Cambridge), Raffaele Cappelli (University of Bologna), and Stan Z. Li (Chinese Academy of Sciences).

We were very pleased to once again extend to the delegates and, we are pleased to th say, our friends the warmest of welcomes to the 8 International Conference on Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems at Wellington - stitute of Technology in Wellington, New Zealand. The KES conferences attract a wide range of interest. The broad focus of the c- ference series is the theory and applications of computational intelligence and em- gent technologies. Once purely a research field, intelligent systems have advanced to the point where their abilities have been incorporated into many conventional appli- tion areas. The quest to encapsulate human knowledge and capabilities in domains such as reasoning, problem solving, sensory analysis, and other complex areas has been avidly pursued. This is because it has been demonstrated that these abilities have definite practical applications. The techniques long ago reached the point where they are being exploited to provide commercial advantages for companies and real beneficial effects on profits. KES 2004 provided a valuable mechanism for delegates to obtain a profound view of the latest intelligent systems research into a range of - gorithms, tools and techniques. KES 2004 also gave delegates the chance to come into contact with those applying intelligent systems in diverse commercial areas. The combination of theory and practice represents a uniquely valuable opportunity for - preciating the full spectrum of intelligent-systems activity and the "state of the art."

The central themes of the 14th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW 2004) were ontological engineering and the Semantic Web. These provide the key foundational and delivery mechanisms for building open, Web-based knowledge services. However, consistent with the tradition of EKAW conferences, EKAW 2004 was concerned with all aspects of eliciting, acquiring, modelling and managing knowledge, and its role in the construction of knowledge-intensive systems. Indeed a key aspect of the Knowledge Acquisition Workshops (KAWs) held in the US, Europe and Asia over the past 20 years has been the emphasis on 'holistic' knowledge engineering, addressing problem solving, usability, socio-technological factors and knowledge modelling, rather than simply analyzing and designing symbol-level inferential mechanisms. The papers included in this volume are thus drawn from a variety of research areas both at the cutting edge of research in ontologies and the Semantic Web and in the more traditionally grounded areas of knowledge engineering. A Semantic Web service can be seen as the addition of semantic technologies to Web services to produce Web-accessible services that can be described using appropriate ontologies, reasoned about and combined automatically. Since Web services can be seen as Web-accessible computational objects, much of the work in this area is also concerned with problem-solving methods (PSMs).

The proceedings of ECML/PKDD 2004 are published in two separate, albeit - tertwined, volumes: theProceedingsofthe 15thEuropeanConferenceonMac- ne Learning (LNAI 3201) and the Proceedings of the 8th European Conferences on Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (LNAI 3202). The two conferences were co-located in Pisa, Tuscany, Italy during September 20-24, 2004. It was the fourth time in a row that ECML and PKDD were co-located. - ter the successful co-locations in Freiburg (2001), Helsinki (2002), and Cavtat- Dubrovnik (2003), it became clear that researchersstrongly supported the or- nization of a major scienti?c event about machine learning and data mining in Europe. We are happy to provide some statistics about the conferences. 581 di?erent papers were submitted to ECML/PKDD (about a 75% increase over 2003); 280 weresubmittedtoECML2004only,194weresubmittedtoPKDD2004only, and 107weresubmitted to both.Aroundhalfofthe authorsforsubmitted papersare from outside Europe, which is a clear indicator of the increasing attractiveness of ECML/PKDD. The Program Committee members were deeply involved in what turned out to be a highly competitive selection process. We assigned each paper to 3 - viewers, deciding on the appropriate PC for papers submitted to both ECML and PKDD. As a result, ECML PC members reviewed 312 papers and PKDD PC members reviewed 269 papers. We accepted for publication regular papers (45 for ECML 2004 and 39 for PKDD 2004) and short papers that were as- ciated with poster presentations (6 for ECML 2004 and 9 for PKDD 2004). The globalacceptance ratewas14.5%for regular papers(17% if we include the short paper

The 7th European Conference on Case-Based Reasoning (ECCBR 2004) was held from August 30 through September 2, at the Complutense University of Madrid, Spain. ECCBR was born in Aberdeen, UK (2002), after a series of - ropeanworkshopsheldinTrento,Italy(2000),Dublin,Ireland(1998),Lausanne, Switzerland (1996), Paris, France (1994), and Kaiserslautern, Germany (1993). ECCBR is the premier international forum for researchers and practitioners of case-based reasoning (CBR) in the years interleaving with the biennial inter- tional counterpart ICCBR, whose 5th edition was held in Trondheim, Norway in 2003. The CBR community has shown for years a deep interest in the application of its research to real-world problems. As a result, the ?rst day of both ECCBR and ICCBR has been traditionally dedicated to presenting industrial CBR - plications. ECCBR 2004 Industry Day was co-chaired by Mehmet Goker and Francisco Martin who invited professionals from di?erent ?elds to describe their ?elded CBR systems. The second day of the conference was dedicated to four workshops focusing on the following research interests: CBR in health sciences, explanation in CBR, computational creativity, and CBR applied to time series prediction. We are grateful to the Workshop Program co-chairs, Pablo Gervas and Kalyan Moy Gupta, for their e?orts in coordinating these workshops, along with the individual workshop chairs and participants. Materials from the Ind- try Day and the workshops were published separately and can be obtained from the ECCBR 2004 website, http://www. idt. mdh. se/eccbr/.

This volume constitutes the proceedings of the 2nd International Joint C- ference on Automated Reasoning (IJCAR 2004) held July 4 8, 2004 in Cork, Ireland. IJCAR 2004 continued the tradition established at the ?rst IJCAR in Siena, Italyin2001, whichbroughttogetherdi?erentresearchcommunitieswo- ing in automated reasoning. The current IJCAR is the fusion of the following conferences: CADE: The International Conference on Automated Deduction, CALCULEMUS: Symposium on the Integration of Symbolic Computation and Mechanized Reasoning, FroCoS: Workshop on Frontiers of Combining Systems, FTP: The International Workshop on First-Order Theorem Proving, and TABLEAUX: The International Conference on Automated Reasoning with Analytic Tableaux and Related Methods. There were 74 research papers submitted to IJCAR as well as 12 system descriptions. After extensive reviewing, 26 research papers and 6 system - scriptions were accepted for presentation at the conference and publication in this volume. In addition, this volume also contains papers from the three invited speakers and a description of the CADE ATP system competition. We would like to acknowledge the enormous amount of work put in by the members of the program committee, the various organizing and steering c- mittees, the IJCAR o?cials, the invited speakers, and the additional referees named on the following pages. We would also like to thank Achim Brucker and Barbara Geiser for their help in producing this volume."

The amounts of information that are ?ooding people both at the workplace and in private life have increased dramatically in the past ten years. The number of paper documents doubles every four years, and the amount of information stored on all data carriers every six years. New knowledge, however, increases at a considerably lower rate. Possibilities for automatic content recognition in various media and for the processing of documents are therefore becoming more important every day. Especially in economic terms, the e?cient handling of information, i.e., ?- ing the right information at the right time, is an invaluable resource for any enterprise, but it is particularly important for small- and medium-sized ent- prises. The market for document management systems, which in Europe had a volume of approximately 5 billion euros in 2000, will increase considerably over the next few years. The BMBF recognized this development at an early stage. As early as in 1995, it pooled national capabilities in this ?eld in order to support research on the automatic processing of information within the framework of a large collaborative project (READ) involving both industrial companies and research centres. Evaluation of the results led to the conclusion that research work had been successful, and, in a second phase, funding was provided for the colla- rative follow-up project Adaptive READ from 1999 to 2003. The completion of thesetwoimportantlong-termresearchprojectshascontributedsubstantiallyto improving the possibilities of content recognition and processing of handwritten, printed and electronic documents.