Flexible Query Answering Systems 2006: 7th International Conference, FQAS 2006, Milan, Italy, June 7-10, 2006, Proceedings

This volume constitutes the proceedings of the Seventh International
Conference on Flexible Query Answering Systems, FQAS 2006, held in
Milan, Italy, on June 7--10, 2006. FQAS is the premier conference
for researchers and practitioners concerned with the vital task of
providing easy, flexible, and intuitive access to information for
every type of need. This multidisciplinary conference draws on
several research areas, including information retrieval, database
management, information filtering, knowledge representation, soft
computing, management of multimedia information, and human-computer
interaction. The overall theme of the FQAS conferences is innovative
query systems aimed at providing easy, flexible, and intuitive
access to information. Such systems are intended to facilitate
retrieval from information repositories such as databases,
libraries, and the World-Wide Web. These repositories are typically
equipped with standard query systems which are often inadequate, and
the focus of FQAS is the development of query systems that are more
expressive, informative, cooperative, and productive. These
proceedings contain contributions from invited speakers and 53
original papers out of about 100 submissions, relating to the topic
of users posing queries and systems producing answers. The papers
cover the fields: Database Management, Information Retrieval, Domain
Modeling, Knowledge Representation and Ontologies, Knowledge
Discovery and Data Mining, Artificial Intelligence, Classical and
Non-classical Logics, Computational Linguistics and Natural Language
Processing, Multimedia Information Systems, and Human--Computer
Interaction, including reports of interesting applications. We wish
to thank the contributors for their excellent papers and the
referees, publisher, and sponsors for their effort. Special thanks
also to the invited speakers, members of the Advisory Board, and
members of the Program Committee. They made the success of FQAS
2006 possible.