The genesis of this volume was the participation of the editors in an ACMlSIGIR (Association for Computing Machinery/Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval) workshop entitled "Beyond Word Relations" (Hetzler, 1997). This workshop examined a number of relationship types with significance for information retrieval beyond the conventional topic-matching relationship. From this shared participation came the idea for an edited volume on relationships, with chapters to be solicited from researchers and practitioners throughout the world. Ultimately, one volume became two volumes. The first volume, Relationships in the Organization of Knowledge (Bean & Green, 200 I), examines the role of relationships in knowledge organization theory and practice, with emphasis given to thesaural relationships and integration across systems, languages, cultures, and disciplines. This second volume examines relationships in a broader array of contexts. The two volumes should be seen as companions, each informing the other. As with the companion volume, we are especially grateful to the authors who willingly accepted challenges of space and time to produce chapters that summarize extensive bodies of research. The value of the volume clearly resides in the quality of the individual chapters. In naming this volume The Semantics of Relationships: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, we wanted to highlight the fact that relationships are not just empty connectives. Relationships constitute important conceptual units and make significant contributions to meaning.

Asia Information Retrieval Symposium (AIRS) was established in 2004 by the Asian information retrieval community after the successful series of Information Retrieval with Asian Languages (IRAL) workshops held in six different locations in Asia, starting from 1996. The AIRS symposium aims to bring together international researchers and developers to exchange new ideas and the latest results in the field of information retrieval (IR). The scope of the symposium covers applications, systems, technologies and theoretical aspects of information retrieval in text, audio, image, video and multi-media data. We are very pleased to report that we saw a sharp and steady increase in the number of submissions and their qualities, compared with previous IRAL workshop series. We received 136 submissions from all over the world including Asia, North America, Europe, Australia, and even Africa, from which 32 papers (23%) were presented in oral sessions and 36 papers in poster sessions (26%). We also held a special session called "Digital Photo Albuming," where 4 oral papers and 3 posters were presented. It was a great challenge and hard work for the program committee to select the best among the excellent papers. The high acceptance rates witness the success and stability of the AIRS series. All the papers and posters are included in this LNCS (Lecture Notes in Computer Science) proceedings volume, which is S- indexed. The technical program included two keynote talks by Prof. Walter Bender and Prof.

TheAsiaInformationRetrievalSymposium(AIRS)wasestablishedbytheAsian information retrieval community after the successful series of Information - trieval with Asian Languages (IRAL) workshops held in six di?erent locations in Asia, starting from 1996. While the IRAL workshops had their focus on inf- mation retrieval problems involving Asian languages, AIRS covers a wider scope of applications, systems, technologies and theory aspects of information retrieval in text, audio, image, video and multimedia data. This extension of the scope re?ects and fosters increasing research activities in information retrieval in this region and the growing need for collaborations across subdisciplines. We are very pleased to report that we saw a sharp increase in the number of submissions and their quality, compared to the IRAL workshops. We received 106papersfromninecountriesinAsiaandNorthAmerica, fromwhich28papers (26%) were presented in oral sessions and 38 papers in poster sessions (36%). It was a great challenge for the Program Committee to select the best among the excellent papers. The low acceptance rates witness the success of this year's conference. After a long discussion between the AIRS 2004 Steering Committee and Springer, the publisher agreed to publish our proceedings in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series, which is SCI-indexed. We feel that this strongly attests to the excellent quality of the papers.

The International Conference on Asian Digital Libraries (ICADL) is an annual international forum that provides opportunities for researchers and experts to meet and exchange research results, innovative ideas and state-of-the-art de- lopments in the digital libraries of their respective countries. Building on the success of the ?rst ?ve ICADL conferences, the 6th ICADL conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia aimed to further strengthen the collaboration and strategic alliance between the di?erent researchers and experts from the Asia-Paci?c - gion in the ?eld of digital libraries. Thethemeoftheconference, DigitalLibraries: TechnologyandManagement of Indigenous Knowledge for Global Access, re?ects the shared belief of the - ganizers that success in the development and implementation of digital libraries in the k-economy is based on four key areas: the technologies that are employed to create a user-friendly environment, organization, interaction, navigation, and access to content; a knowledge management approach that ensures all types of knowledge (explicit, tacit and implicit) are included; indigenous content, which implies the creation of suitable and speci?c content to meet the needs of the indigenous community; and global access, which implies that content should be made available across time and space, and also implies that the content should be ?exible enough to meet global needs. The ICADL 2003 began with an opening ceremony and a keynote address."

Recent advances in Internet and Web technologies and the advent of Web 2.0 have made it possible to share information and knowledge surrounding human activities. These activities can be captured through the intensive deployment of sensors and the Web resources. Experiential Knowledge Mining provides a comprehensive overview of mining experiential knowledge bearing on human activities, with an emphasis on the use of the Web. Starting with definitions of activities and experiences, it elaborates on various views of human activities in cognitive science, including knowledge representation schemes. It then describes two activity detection techniques arising from different types of information sources: (1) sensor-driven approaches for the physical space and (2) text-driven approaches for the cyberspace. With a focus on experiential knowledge of human activities that can be discovered from unstructured text, Experiential Knowledge Mining reviews and summarizes the existing body of literature on experiential knowledge filtering, context identification for knowledge, and knowledge distillation. There is no doubt that the vast amount of information about human experience that includes activities is going to help detecting, recognizing, and understanding human activities of various sorts. This monograph illustrates the various potential applications of experiential knowledge in different domains like information retrieval, service recommendation, and semantic web. Experiential Knowledge Mining is the first to take a comprehensive look at this fascinating topic and acts as an ideal primer for anyone who wants to delve deeper into this subject.