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."

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.

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.

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.