Report on the fourth international conference on flexible query answering systems (FQAS 2000)
Patrick Bosc, Amihai Motro, Gabriella Pasi · ACM SIGMOD Record · 2001
The fourth International Conference on Flexible Query Answering Systems (FQAS'2000) was held at the Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, Poland on October, 25-27, 2000. This series of conferences was launched in 1994 by Troels Andreasen, Henning Christiansen and Henrik Larsen from Roskilde University in Denmark, who have been the main driving force behind this series ever since. The previous FQAS events were held in Denmark in 1994, 1996, mad 1998. The next conference in this series will return to Denmark in 2002.This conference provides an opportunity for researchers, developers and practitioners to explore new ideas and approaches in a multidisciplinary forum to the aim of providing effective solutions to the problem of easy, flexible and intuitive access to electronically stored information. The focus of this conference is to add flexibility to the systems for the storage and access to information; as there exist several classes of such systems, the conference draws on several research areas, including information retrieval, database management, knowledge representation, multimedia systems and human-computer interaction.As a paradigm for flexible query answering we may think about an expert human intermediary who is able to analyze users information needs and to evaluate the relevant information items from the available information sources. The knowledge on the information sources and the capability to interpret the user requests enable the expert to perform a good estimate of the items possibly satisfying the users needs, though the query, per se, may be imprecise, incomplete, etc. Thus, one of the key issues for defining flexible query answering system is the tolerance to imprecision and uncertainty in the formulation of user queries as well as in the representation of information.The conference brought together more than 70 researchers and developers working in the area of information technology. The conference program included five invited talks, a keynote speech and 12 technical sessions. There was a total of 55 reviewed papers included in the technical sessions.In the proceedings, the contributions are gathered according to 6 main topics, each one corresponding to one or more technical sessions. These principal themes are the following: Flexibility in Database Management and Querying, Information Retrieval, Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Natural Language and Multimedia Processing, Acquisition of Data and Knowledge, Cyberspace and distributed data.The rest of this report provides a brief summary of the three main thematic areas.