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...