The Fourth International Working Conference on Statistical and Scientific Data Base Management (IV SSDBM) held on June 21-23, 1988 in Rome, Italy, continued the series of conferences initiated in California in December 1981. The purpose of this conference was to bring together database researchers, users and system builders, working in this specific field, to discuss the particular points of interest, to propose new solutions to the problems of the domain and to expand the topics of the previous conferences, both from the theoretical and from the applicational point of view. The papers of four scientific sessions dealt with the following topics: knowledge base and expert system, data model, natural language processing, query language, time performance, user interface, heterogeneous data classification, storage constraints, automatic drawing, ranges and trackers, and arithmetic coding. Two other special sessions presented work on progress papers on geographical data modelling, spatial database queries, user interface in an Object Oriented SDB, interpretation of queries, graphical query language and knowledge browsing front ends. The conference also had three invited papers on topics of particular interest such as "Temporal Data", "Statistical Data Management Requirements" and "Knowledge Based Decision Support Systems", included in this volume. The introductory paper by M. Rafanelli provides both an introduction to the general concepts helpful to people outside the field and a survey of all the papers in these Proceedings. Furthermore, there were three open panels. Papers by the chairmen, contributions of the panelists and a summary of the respective discussions are included in this volume, too.

Pour Ie cinquieme congres de la serie, COMPSTAT 82 reunit environ 500 participants d'origines scientifiques et geographiques tres variees, prouvant a l'evidence l'interet persis tant de la communaute scientifique pour tous les problemes de calculs statistiques. Le Comite de Programme charge de l'organisation scientifique du Congres etait com pose de: o S. Apelt (Republique democratique d'Allemagne) - A. Bj6rck (Suede) - H. Caussinus (France), President - Y. Escoufier (France) - A. de Falguerolles (France), Secretaire - J.W. Frane (U.S.A.) - J. Gordesch (Republique Federale d'Allemagne) - Th. Havranek (Tchechoslovaquie) - N. Lauro (Italie) - C. Millier (France) - R.J. Mokken (pays-Bas)- R. Tomassone (France) - D. Wishart (Royaume Uni) Ce Comite a decide d'augmenter Ie nombre des conferenciers invites, cherchant de la sorte une representation des diverses ecoles ainsi que l'introduction de nouveaux themes. La tache la plus difficile a ensuite ete de selectionner une soixantaine de contributions parmi 250 soumissions. La encore Ie Comite de Programme s'est efforce de favoriser des voies qui semblaient les plus nouvelles et a essaye de maintenir une bonne repartition scientifique et geographique. Cependant, comme dans les precedents congres COMPSTAT, il a donne la preference aux propositions clairement marquees simultanement du double aspect Statistique et Calcul. Dans bien des cas, ces deux aspects sont tres lies rendant en particulier difficile et peu pertinente toute classification fine des contributions.

Comprehensive coverage of critical issues related to information science and technology.

The purpose of the Fifth International Conference on Statistical and Scientific Databases was to bring together database researchers, users, and system builders, to discuss the particular issues of interest and to propose new solutions to the problems of the area, both from the theoretical and from the application point of view. This proceedings volume contains three invited papers as well as the other 13 contributions. The papers cover a wide area of research: object oriented database systems, semantic modelling, deductive mathematical databases, security of statistical databases, implementational issues for scientific databases, temporal summary table management, graphical and visual interfaces, query optimization, distributed databases, and economic and geographical databases.