The volume aims at providing a comprehensive review of the diverse efforts covering the gap existing between the two main perspectives on the topic of ontologies for multi-agent systems. On the one hand, there is the knowledge modelling perspective; i.e. how ontologies should be modelled and represented in order to be effectively used in agent systems. On the other hand, there is the agent perspective; what kind of capabilities should be exhibited by an agent in order to make use of ontological knowledge and to perform efficient reasoning with it. Theory and experiences are emphasized as the volume collects the most significant papers of the AAMAS 2002 and AAMAS 2003 workshop on ontologies for agent systems, and the EKAW 2002 workshop on ontologies for multi-agent systems.

This volume contains expanded and updated versions of papers presented at CIKM 92, the First International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, held in Baltimore, Maryland, in November 1992. The conference participants came from the fields of database management, information retrieval, and artificial intelligence. A major theme in the volume is how these fields are merging and enriching each other. Theeight papers discuss: discovering context in a conceptual schema; a system for face information retrieval; queries in OODB systems; consistency checking in OODBs; integrity constraints representation in OODBs; a framework for temporal object databases; inductive dependencies and approximate databases; OODB design methodologies.