Here are the refereed proceedings of the First International Conference on Knowledge Science, Engineering and Management, KSEM 2006, held in Guilin, China in August 2006 in conjunction with PRICAI 2006. The book presents 51 revised full papers and 57 revised short papers together with 4 invited talks, reporting a wealth of new ideas and current research results in the broad areas of knowledge science, knowledge engineering, and knowledge management.

This book describes and clarifies how certain problems can be resolved in Japan and Asia. For the future, the focus should be on Japan, which can provide "common knowledge" as a public good. The book collects the results of researchers in Japan, China, South Korea, and Indonesia on declining birthrates and aging, rapid technological innovation and societal changes, and recovery from natural disasters.Chapter 1 covers Japanese social welfare system reform and transformation of social governance. Chapter 2 deals with the decreasing birthrate and national security. Chapters 3 to 5 discuss three aspects of the impact of modern technology on Japanese society. Chapter 6 and 7 include the research results on recovery from the earthquake disasters in Indonesia and East Japan. Through reading this book, the increasingly necessity to capture Japanese studies in Asia as a public good can be understood. The authors believe that sharing of knowledge as a public good is of great help in solving problems for the future.