Information Modelling and Knowledge Bases XII

This book is the twelfth volume in the series "Information Modelling and Knowledge Bases". The series dates back on the end of the 1980's, with annual publications now amounting to 310 reviewed articles. The articles introduce results of the work and collaboration in a geographically wide researcher network originating from the Finnish-Japanese research initiative begun in 1988. Annually, the published papers are formally reviewed by an international program committee and selected for the annual conference forming a forum for presentations, criticism and discussions, taken into account in the final published versions. Each paper has been reviewed by three or four reviewers. This time 54 % of submissions were accepted. They are printed in this volume. The topics of the articles in this volume cover a wide variety of themes in the domain of theory and practice of information modelling, conceptual modelling, design and specification of information systems, software engineering, databases and knowledge bases. In the following some of the articles are grouped on the basis of their main themes. The contributions represent the following major themes: 1. Models in intelligent activity 2. Concept modelling, conceptual modelling, ontologies, and epistemic processes 3. Conceptual modelling and information requirements specification 4. Collections of concepts, knowledge base design, and data base design 5. Human-computer interaction and modelling 6. Software engineering and modelling 7. Applications