Information systems are large repositories of factual and inferential knowledge intended to be queried and maintained by a wide variety of users with different backgrounds and work tasks. The community of potential information system users is growing rapidly with advances in hardware and software technology that permit computer/communications support for more and more application areas. Unfortunately, it is often felt that progress in user interface technology has not quite matched that of other areas. Technical solutions such as computer graphics, natural language processing, or man-machine-man communications in office systems are not enough by themselves. They should be complemented by system features that ensure cooperative behavior of the interfaces, thus reducing the training and usage effort required for successful interaction. In analogy to a human dialog partner, we call an interface cooperative if it does not just accept user requests passively or answer them literally, but actively attempts to understand the users' intentions and to help them solve their applica tion problems. This leads to the central question addressed by this book: What makes an information systems interface cooperative, and how do we provide capabilities leading to cooperative interfaces? Many answers are possible. A first aspect concerns the formulation and accep tance of user requests. Many researchers assume that such requests should be formulated in natural language.

This volume contains the proceedings of the 6th International Conference of the BCS Specialist Group on Information Systems Methodologies. The conference brought together papers on methodology issues related to the development and management of emerging technology based information systems. As usual there was a good range of papers addressing the 'soft' and 'hard' aspects of IS development and management. Methodologies for Developing and Managing Emerging Technology-based Information Systems will be of interest to practitioners who are engaged in systems development and modifying or aligning existing methodologies to practice.

This book is the very first book-length study devoted to the advances in technological development and systems research in cooperative economics. The chapters provide, first of all, a coherent framework for understanding and applying the concepts and approaches of complexity and systems science for the advanced study of cooperative networks and particular cooperative enterprises and communities. Second, the book serves as a unique source of reliable information on the frontier information technologies available for the production, consumer, credit, and agricultural cooperative enterprises, discussing predominant strategies, potential drivers of change, and responses to complex problems. Given the diverse range of backgrounds and advanced research results, researchers, decision-makers, and stakeholders from all fields of cooperative economics in any country of the world will undoubtedly benefit from this book.

A brief survey of the major DBMS and HeI conference proceedings over the past 10 years will reveal isolated pockets of research in database user interfaces but little sense of being swept along with the general advances in DBMS technology and Hel. New data models have evolved to meet the needs of different application domains; persistent programming languages are blurring the traditional distinction between data definition and application programming languages; distribution and inter-operability have become issues as have the storage of heterogeneous media types; yet it is still rare to read of the HeI issues raised by these technological innovations being expressly addressed and rarer still to find recognition of the usability problems with longer-established database technologies. There are at least two reasons why this should be surprising: • Database systems are not like other computer systems; existing both as back-ends to other applications and as stand-alone data stores, they are typically slow, deal with very large volumes of data and can involve all sorts of security, confidentiality and even cooperability issues. • Databases are everywhere. Perhaps only word processors and spread sheets are more widespread. In addition, as business cultures change and personal computing continues to mould expectations, end-users find themselves interacting increasingly closely with database systems.

Annotation The main goal of the COOP conferences is to contribute to the solution of problems related to the design of cooperative systems, and to the integration of these systems in organizational settings. The main assumption behind the COOP conferences is that cooperative design requires a deep understanding of cooperative work in groups and organizations, involving both artifacts and social practices. The COOP 2002 conference is mainly devoted to the following issues: the gap between 'virtual' and 'material' artifacts in human collaboration; collaboration among mobile actors; the WWW as a platform for cooperative systems and changing practices and organizations in the wake of the cooperative systems.

Grid and cooperative computing has emerged as a new frontier of information tech- logy. It aims to share and coordinate distributed and heterogeneous network resources forbetterperformanceandfunctionalitythatcanotherwisenotbeachieved.Thisvolume contains the papers presented at the 2nd International Workshop on Grid and Coope- tive Computing, GCC 2003, which was held in Shanghai, P.R. China, during December 7–10, 2003. GCC is designed to serve as a forum to present current and future work as well as to exchange research ideas among researchers, developers, practitioners, and usersinGridcomputing,Webservicesandcooperativecomputing,includingtheoryand applications. For this workshop, we received over 550 paper submissions from 22 countries and regions. All the papers were peer-reviewed in depth and qualitatively graded on their relevance, originality, signi?cance, presentation, and the overall appropriateness of their acceptance. Any concerns raised were discussed by the program committee. The or- nizing committee selected 176 papers for conference presentation (full papers) and 173 submissions for poster presentation (short papers).The papers included herein represent the forefront of research from China, USA, UK, Canada, Switzerland, Japan, Aust- lia, India, Korea, Singapore, Brazil, Norway, Greece, Iran, Turkey, Oman, Pakistan and other countries. More than 600 attendees participated in the technical section and the exhibition of the workshop.

Multimodal Interfaces represents an emerging interdisciplinary research direction and has become one of the frontiers in Computer Science. Multimodal interfaces aim at efficient, convenient and natural interaction and communication between computers (in their broadest sense) and human users. They will ultimately enable users to interact with computers using their everyday skills. These proceedings include the papers accepted for presentation at the Third International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces (ICMI 2000) held in Beijing, China on 1416 O ctober 2000. The papers were selected from 172 contributions submitted worldwide. Each paper was allocated for review to three members of the Program Committee, which consisted of more than 40 leading researchers in the field. Final decisions of 38 oral papers and 48 poster papers were made based on the reviewers’ comments and the desire for a balance of topics. The decision to have a single track conference led to a competitive selection process and it is very likely that some good submissions are not included in this volume. The papers collected here cover a wide range of topics such as affective and perceptual computing, interfaces for wearable and mobile computing, gestures and sign languages, face and facial expression analysis, multilingual interfaces, virtual and augmented reality, speech and handwriting, multimodal integration and application systems. They represent some of the latest progress in multimodal interfaces research.