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                                  Preface


The Internet has been changing the society and the economy, and the way in-
stitutions and businesses operate has evolved rapidly. All citizens are now ex-
pected to interact directly with technology based systems without direct human
intermediation, using different interface appliances. Moreover, many information
systems interact with each other with limited human supervision. Therefore, it
is of the utmost importance that semantic aspects are taken into consideration
on a sound basis.
    Improved communication and understanding between people, the final ob-
jective of advanced information systems, requires improved communication and
understanding between systems and its developers. Advanced information sys-
tems engineering therefore needs to keep improving its methods and technologies.
This is the background and motivation to choose “IMPROVING COMMUNI-
CATION AND UNDERSTANDING BETWEEN SYSTEMS AND BETWEEN
CITIZENS” as the main theme of this years CAiSE conference, the 17th in the
series of International Conferences on Advanced Information Systems Engineer-
ing. This edition continues the success of the previous conferences, a success
largely due to that fact that, since its first edition, this series has been able
to evolve in parallel to the evolution of the Information System methods and
technology. CAiSE has been able to follow, and often to anticipate, the deep
changes that have occurred, since the late 70s when the first CAiSE Conference
was organised by Arne Sølvberg and Janis Bubenko.
    The CAiSE Forum is now becoming an important component of CAiSE con-
ferences. In addition to the highly competitive program of regular original sci-
entific contributions we want to offer an additional communication channel for
short focused contributions, with a short “time to market”, i.e. a brief time span
between writing and printing, nevertheless rigorously peer reviewed for quality
assurance. The presentation of these innovative ideas and fresh results of sci-
entific explorations in form of posters and demos in a pleasant communicative
environment will contribute to their fast dissemination, as we hope, and will
bring together people with shared interests and stimulate discussions.
    These proceedings consist of 34 papers, of which 22 were selected from the
262 submitted regular papers (in addition to the 36 papers accepted for the main
tracks), and 12 were selected from the 29 submitted Forum contributions.
    We wish to devote a special thanking to the young colleagues who dedicated
a great amount of energies to support the local organisation, the PC activities,
and the organisation of the publishing of this volume.



May 2005, Braga, Klagenfurt, Porto, Valencia

               Orlando Belo, Johann Eder, João Falcão e Cunha, Oscar Pastor