This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on String Processing and Information Retrieval, SPIRE 2002, held in Lisbon, Portugal in September 2002. The 19 revised full papers and 6 short papers presented together with 3 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 54 submissions. the papers are organzied in topical sections on string matching, string processing, Web ranking and link analysis, pattern matching, digital libraries and applications, approximate searching and indexing techniques.

Conceptual modeling has long been recognized as the primary means to enable software development in information systems and data engineering. Conceptual modeling provides languages, methods and tools to understand and represent the application domain; to elicit, conceptualize and formalize system requirements and user needs; to communicate systems designs to all stakeholders; and to formally verify and validate systems design on high levels of abstraction. Recently, ontologies added an important tool to conceptualize and formalize system specification. The International Conference on...