On behalf of the Organizing Committee, we would like to welcome you to the proccedings of the 23rd International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER 2004). This conference provided an international forum for technical discussion on conceptual modeling of information systems among researchers, developers and users. This was the third time that this conference was held in Asia; the ?rst time was in Singapore in 1998 and the second time was in Yokohama, Japan in 2001. China is the third largest nation with the largest population in the world. Shanghai, the largest city in China and a great metropolis, famous in Asia and throughout the world, is therefore a most appropriate location to host this conference. This volume contains papers selected for presentation and includes the two keynote talks by Prof. Hector Garcia-Molina and Prof. Gerhard Weikum, and an invited talk by Dr. Xiao Ji. This volume also contains industrial papers and demo/poster papers. An additional volume contains papers from 6 workshops. The conference also featured three tutorials: (1) Web Change Management andDelta Mining: Opportunities andSolutions, by SanjayMadria, (2)A Survey of Data Quality Issues in Cooperative Information Systems, by Carlo Batini, and (3) Visual SQL - An ER-Based Introduction to Database Programming, by Bernhard Thalhe

The Asia-Paci?c region has emerged in recent years as one of the fastest g- wing regions in the world in the use of Web technologies as well as in making signi?cant contributions to WWW research and development. Since the ?rst Asia-Paci?c Web conference in 1998, APWeb has continued to provide a forum for researchers, professionals, and industrial practitioners from around the world to share their rapidly evolving knowledge and to report new advances in WWW technologies and applications. APWeb 2004 received an overwhelming 386 full-paper submissions, including 375 research papers and 11 industrial papers from 20 countries and regions: A- tralia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Greece, HongKong, India, Iran, Japan, Korea, Norway, Singapore, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, Turkey, UK, USA, and Vietnam. Each submission was carefully reviewed by three members of the p- gram committee. Among the 386 submitted papers, 60 regular papers, 24 short papers, 15 poster papers, and 3 industrial papers were selected to be included in the proceedings. The selected papers cover a wide range of topics including Web services, Web intelligence, Web personalization, Web query processing, Web - ching, Web mining, text mining, data mining and knowledge discovery, XML database and query processing, work?ow management, E-commerce, data - rehousing, P2P systems and applications, Grid computing, and networking. The paper entitled "Towards Adaptive Probabilistic Search in Unstructured P2P - stems," co-authored by Linhao Xu, Chenyun Dai, Wenyuan Cai, Shuigeng Zhou, and Aoying Zhou, was awarded the best APWeb 2004 student paper.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Web-Age Information Management, WAIM 2001, held in Xi'an, China, in July 2001.The 21 revised full papers and 12 short papers presented together with 4 research experience papers were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the proceedings. The papers are organized in topical sections on multimedia databases and high-dimensional indexing, information retrieval and text indexing, data mining, semistructured data management, data warehousing and federated databases, Web information management and e-commerce, spatio-temporal and high-dimensional information management, data mining and constraint management, data integration and filtering, and workflow and adaptive systems.

Database research and development has been remarkably successful over the past three decades. Now the field is facing new challenges posted by the rapid advances of technology, especially the penetration of the Web and Internet into everyone's daily life. The economical and financial environment where database systems are used has been changing dramatically. In addition to being able to efficiently manage a large volume of operational data generated internally, the ability to manage data in cyberspace, extract relevant information, and discover knowledge to support decision making is critical to the success of any organization. In order to provide researchers and practitioners with a forum to share their experiences in tackling problems in managing and using data, information, and knowledge in the age of the Internet and Web, the First International Conference on Web-Age Information Management (WAIM 2000) was held in Shanghai, China, June 21-23. The inaugural conference in its series was well received. Researchers from 17 countries and regions, including Austria, Australia, Bahrain, Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, The Netherlands, Poland, Singapore, Spain, Taiwan, UK, and USA submitted their recent work. Twenty-seven regular and 14 short papers contained in these proceedings were presented during the two-day conference. These papers cover a large spectrum of issues, from classical data management such as object-oriented modeling, spatial and temporal databases to recent hits like data mining, data warehousing, semi-structured data, and XML.