The 22nd International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER 2003) returned to Chicago after an absence of 18 years. Chicago, a city well known for its trendsetting and daring architecture, has met the new century with a renewed commitment to open public spaces and human interaction. Thus it provided a ?tting venue for ER 2003, the scope of which was expanded to encompass all aspects of conceptual modeling in order to deal with constantly changing information technology and business practices and to accommodate a new openness in connecting systems to each other and to human users. The ER 2003 Program Co-chairs, Il-Yeol Song, Stephen Liddle, and Tok Wang Ling, along with an outstanding Program Committee assembled one of the ?nest technical programs of this conference series. In keeping with the tradition of previous ER conferences, the program for ER 2003 also included four preconference workshops, two preconference tutorials, two conference tutorials, two panels, and a demos and poster session. The Program Co-chairs, as well as Manfred Jeusfeld and Oscar Pastor (Workshop Co-chairs), Ee-Peng Lim and Tobey Teorey (Tutorial Co-chairs), Avigdor Gal and Elisa Bertino (Panel Co-chairs), and Heinrich Mayr (Demos and Poster Chair), deserve our appreciation for an excellent job. It was a pleasure working with all of them."

The workshop on an Infrastructure for Mobile and Wireless Systems was held in Scottsdale, Arizona on October 15, 2001 and was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and sponsored by the Telecommunications and Information Technology Institute of the College of Engineering at Florida International U- versity (FIU), to establish a common infrastructure for the discipline of mobile and wireless networking, and to serve its rapidly emerging mobile and wireless community of researchers and practitioners. The workshop provides a single, cohesive, and high-quality forum for disseminating research and experience in this emerging ?eld. Of signi?cance is the integration of many diverse com- nities. The areas of mobile and wireless networking combine the best of both worlds, namely academia and industry. The objective of the workshop is to - ?ne and establish a common infrastructure of the discipline and to develop a consensus-based document that will provide a foundation for implementation, standardization, and further research. Workshop Program Chairs Dr. Birgitta K] onig-Ries (Universit]at Karlsruhe), and Dr. Peter Scheuermann (Northwestern University) and Vice Program Chair Dr. S. A. M. Makki (Queensland University of Technology), assembled a truly - pressive program committee. Together with the program committee, they worked diligently to select papers and speakers that met the criteria of high quality and relevance to our various ?elds of interest. It takes time and e?ort to review a - per carefully, and every member of the program committee is to be commended for his/her contribution to the success of this workshop."

Cooperation among systems has gained substantial importance in recent years: electronic commerce virtual enterprises and the middleware paradigm are just some examples in this area. CoopIS is a multi-disciplinary conference, which deals with all aspects of cooperation. The relevant disciplines are: collaborative work, distributed databases, distributed computing, electronic commerce, human-computer interaction, multi-agent systems, information retrieval, and workflow systems. The CoopIS series provides a forum for well-known researchers who are drawn by the stature and the tradition of these conference series and has a leading role in shaping the future of the cooperative information systems area. CoopIS 2000 is the seventh conference in the series and the fifth conference organized by the International Foundation on Cooperative Information Systems (IFCIS). It is sponsored by the IFCIS, the IBM Research Laboratory in Haifa and Compaq, Tandem labs Israel. It replaces the former international workshops on Interoperability in Multidatabase systems (IMS) and the conference series on Cooperative Information Systems (CoopIS & ICICIS). In response to the call for papers 74 papers were submitted. Each of them was reviewed by at least three reviewers, and at the end of this process 24 papers were accepted for presentation at the conference. Six additional papers were selected for short presentations. In addition the conference includes two panels, two keynote speakers (Professor Calton Pu from Georgia Tech and Professor Sheizaf Rafaeli from Haifa University) and one tutorial. A special issue of the International Journal of Cooperative Information Systems will follow. August 2000 Opher Etzion & Peter Scheuermann