Professional knowledge management is imperative for the success of enterprises. One decisive factor for the success of knowledge management projects is the coordination of elements such as corporate culture, enterprise organization, - man resource management, as well as information and communication techn- ogy. The proper alignment and balancing of these factors are currently little understood especially the role of information technology, which is often - garded only as an implementation tool, though it can be a catalyst by making new knowledge management solutions possible. This conference brought together representativesfrom practical and research ?elds for discussing experiences, professional applications, and visions through presentations, workshops, tutorials, and an accompanying industry exhibition. The main focus of the conference was the realization of knowledge mana- ment strategies with the aid of innovative information technology solutions, such as intelligent access to organizational memories, or integration of business processes and knowledge management. Also of interest were holistic/integrative approaches to knowledge management that deal with issues raised by the in- gration of people, organizations, and information technology."

Thisvolumecontainspapersselectedforpresentationatthe6thIAPRWorkshop on Document Analysis Systems (DAS 2004) held during September 8-10, 2004 at the University of Florence, Italy. Several papers represent the state of the art in a broad range of "traditional" topics such as layout analysis, applications to graphics recognition, and handwritten documents. Other contributions address the description of complete working systems, which is one of the strengths of this workshop. Some papers extend the application domains to other media, like the processing of Internet documents. The peculiarity of this 6th workshop was the large number of papers related to digital libraries and to the processing of historical documents, a taste which frequently requires the analysis of color documents. A total of 17 papers are associated with these topics, whereas two yearsago (in DAS 2002) only a couple of papers dealt with these problems. In our view there are three main reasons for this new wave in the DAS community. From the scienti?c point of view, several research ?elds reached a thorough knowledge of techniques and problems that can be e?ectively solved, and this expertise can now be applied to new domains. Another incentive has been provided by several research projects funded by the EC and the NSF on topics related to digital libraries.

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.

While information and communication technology has a vast influence on our lives, little is understood about its effects on the way we learn. In the Age of Information, students - consciously or not - are learning in diverse formal and informal environments from a broad variety of sources, with scientific knowledge competing against unfounded assertions, and misinformation and biased data spreading through social and mass media. The Positive Learning in the Age of Information (PLATO) program illustrated by the contributions in this book unites outstanding and highly innovative expertise on the fundamentals of information processing and human learning to investigate a new paradigm of positive learning as a vital, morally and ethically oriented approach, which is of existential importance to maintaining the civilization standards of a modern society in the digital age.

The four-volume set LNAI 6881-LNAI 6884 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems, KES 2011, held in Kaiserslautern, Germany, in September 2011. Part 3: The total of 244 high-quality papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The 67 papers of Part 3 are organized in topical sections on skill acquisition and ubiquitous human computer interaction, intelligent network and service, management technologies from the perspective of kansei engineering and emotion, data mining and service science for innovation, knowledge-based systems for e-business, knowledge engineering applications in process systems and plant operations, advanced design techniques for adaptive hardware and systems, human-oriented learning technology and learning support environment, design of social intelligence and creativity environment.

The four-volume set LNAI 6881-LNAI 6884 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems, KES 2011, held in Kaiserslautern, Germany, in September 2011. Part 2: The total of 244 high-quality papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The 70 papers of Part 2 are organized in topical sections on web intelligence, text and multimedia mining and retrieval, intelligent tutoring systems and e-learning environments, other / misc. intelligent systems topics, methods and techniques of artificial and computational intelligence in economics, finance and decision making, workshop on seamless integration of semantic technologies in computer-supported office work (sistcow), innovations in chance discovery, advanced knowledge-based systems, recent trends in knowledge engineering, smart systems, and their applications.

Dieses Lehrbuch bietet eine umfassende Einfuhrung in Grundlagen, Potentiale und Anwendungen Semantischer Technologien. Es richtet sich an Studierende der Informatik und angrenzender Facher sowie an Entwickler, die Semantische Technologien am Arbeitsplatz oder in verteilten Applikationen nutzen moechten. Mit seiner an praktischen Beispielen orientierten Darstellung gibt es aber auch Anwendern und Entscheidern in Unternehmen einen breiten UEberblick uber Nutzen und Moeglichkeiten dieser Technologie. Semantische Technologien versetzen Computer in die Lage, Informationen nicht nur zu speichern und wieder zu finden, sondern sie ihrer Bedeutung entsprechend auszuwerten, zu verbinden, zu Neuem zu verknupfen, und so flexibel und zielgerichtet nutzliche Leistungen zu erbringen. Das vorliegende Buch stellt im ersten Teil die als Semantische Technologien bezeichneten Techniken, Sprachen und Reprasentationsformalismen vor. Diese Elemente erlauben es, das in Informationen enthaltene Wissen formal und damit fur den Computer verarbeitbar zu beschreiben, Konzepte und Beziehungen darzustellen und schliesslich Inhalte zu erfragen, zu erschliessen und in Netzen zuganglich zu machen. Der zweite Teil beschreibt, wie mit Semantischen Technologien elementare Funktionen und umfassende Dienste der Informations- und Wissensverarbeitung realisiert werden koennen. Hierzu gehoeren etwa die Annotation und das Erschliessen von Information, die Suche in den resultierenden Strukturen, das Erklaren von Bedeutungszusammenhangen sowie die Integration einzelner Komponenten in komplexe Ablaufprozesse und Anwendungsloesungen. Der dritte Teil beschreibt schliesslich vielfaltige Anwendungsbeispiele in unterschiedlichen Bereichen und illustriert so Mehrwert, Potenzial und Grenzen von Semantischen Technologien. Die dargestellten Systeme reichen von Werkzeugen fur persoenliches, individuelles Informationsmanagement uber Unterstutzungsfunktionen fur Gruppen bis hin zu neuen Ansatzen im Internet der Dinge und Dienste, einschliesslich der Integration verschiedener Medien und Anwendungen von Medizin bis Musik.