This book will be of interest to built environment professionals and to students of the economics and management of the built environment. It shows the value of integrating ideas and data about the production of the built environment as an industrial process with theories and data about the demand for construction. The approach taken is institutional and post-Keynesian, and illuminates an important and distinctive sector of the economy, embracing design, construction and property industries. This book offers some new and important perspectives for research and teaching in construction economics and management.

This yearmarks anexciting time in the XML-database space: XQueryis moving closer to becoming a full W3C Recommendation, and the "Big 3" database vendors (IBM, Oracle, Microsoft) are expected to release XQuery support in theirrelationalDBMSs, joininganumberofexistingopensourceandcommercial products. Thus, we are very pleased to feature an industrial paper (describing theXML-speci?cfeaturesofMicrosoftSQLServer)aswellas14researchpapers. XSym's focus this year was on building XML repositories, and papers discussed the following topics: indexing support for the evaluation of XPath and XQuery; benchmarks and algorithms for XQuery and XPath evaluation; algorithms for constraint satisfaction checking, information extraction, and subtree matching; and applications of XML in information systems. This year, XSym also coordinated its e?orts with the Database and P- gramming Languages Symposium, DBPL 2005. The resulting program included not only presentations of the papers in this proceedings, but also a joint DBPL- XSym keynote talk by Giuseppe Castagna, developer of the CDuce language for XML processing, and a joint panel on open XML research problems and challenges. The organizers would like to express their gratitude to the XSym Program Committee and external reviewers for their e?orts in providing very thorough evaluationsofthesubmittedpapersundersigni?canttimeconstraintsandto- crosoftfortheirsponsorshipandfortheuseoftheMicrosoftConferenceMana- ment Toolkit. We would also like to thank Gavin Bierman and Christoph Koch, the organizersof DBPL, for their e?orts andtheir willingness to coordinate with us. These proceedings are dedicated to Alberto Mendelzon who sadly passed awaythisyear.Asastrongsupporterofandactivecontributortothissymposium series he will always remain in our memory.

This book will be of interest to built environment professionals and to students of the economics and management of the built environment. It shows the value of integrating ideas and data about the production of the built environment as an industrial process with theories and data about the demand for construction. The approach taken is institutional and post-Keynesian, and illuminates an important and distinctive sector of the economy, embracing design, construction and property industries. This book offers some new and important perspectives for research and teaching in construction economics and management.