This Switzerland-Japan Joint Seminar on Multimedia and Databases was held to achieve at least three goals. First, it enabled us to present and discuss our recent research results and exchange our ideas for further promotion of science and technology. The second goal was to establish a friendly relationship between the Swiss and the Japanese. The last, but not least, aim was to disseminate information about our plans by publishing the proceedings of this seminar. We thought that publishing the outcome of the seminar would be essential in order not to store the treasure — the seminar...

The first of a series, this book contains updated versions of selected papers from the First International Symposium on Database Systems for Advanced Applications.

This volume contains the proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications (DASFAA '97). DASFAA '97 focused on advanced database technologies and their applications. The 55 papers in this volume cover a wide range of areas in the field of database systems and applications - including the rapidly emerging areas of the Internet, multimedia, and document database systems - and should be of great interest to all database system researchers and developers, and practitioners.