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The liberalisation in the telecommunication market and thus the advent of competition has had a tremendous impact on business in this area. New operators have started to offer telecommunication services in competition with the classical national network operators. This in turn will have an impact on the market share, the tariff structure, the Quality of Service (QoS) and the services offered to the end customers. A way to maintain or increase revenue for network operators is to additionally offer new services to the customers. The final target is a so-called "Full Service Network (FSN)", which is capable of offering all types of bi-directional multimedia services. The provisioning of new telecommunication services in general and new multimedia services in particular is made possible by the availability of several new technologies as well as through advances in standardisation. R&D policies world-wide but especially in Europe have forced the development of new networking technologies such as ATM, xDSL and HFC as well as new video technologies as defined by DVB and DAVIC.

The 1999 International Workshop on Interactive Distributed Multimedia Sys tems and Telecommunication Services (IDMS) in Toulouse is the sixth in a se ries that started in 1992. The previous workshops were held in Stuttgart in 1992, Hamburg in 1994, Berlin in 1996, Darmstadt in 1997, and Oslo in 1998. The area of interest of IDMS ranges from basic system technologies, such as networking and operating system support, to all kinds of teleservices and distributed multimedia applications. Technical solutions for telecommunications and distributed multimedia systems are merging and quality-of-service (QoS) will play a key role in both areas. However, the range from basic system tech nologies to distributed mutlimedia applications and teleservices is still very broad and we have to understand the implications of multimedia applications and their requirements for middleware and networks. We are challenged to develop new and more fitting solutions for all distributed multimedia systems and telecom munication services to meet the requirements of the future information society.

With all of the news about the Internet and the Y2K problem, it is easy to forget that other areas of computer science still exist. Reading the newspaper or watching the television conveys a very warped view of what is happening in computer science. This conference illustrates how a maturing subdiscipline of computer science can continue to grow and integrate within it both old and new approaches despite (or perhaps due to) a lack of public awareness. The conceptual graph community has basically existed since the 1984 publication of John Sowa's book, "Conceptual Structures: Information Processing In Mind and Machine." In this book, John Sowa laid the foundations for a knowledge representation model called conceptual graphs based on semantic networks and the existential graphs of C.S. Peirce. Conceptual graphs constitutes a very powerful and expressive knowledge representation scheme, inheriting the benefits of logic and the mathematics of graphs. The expressiveness and formal underpinnings of conceptual graph theory have attracted a large international community of researchers and scholars. The International Conferences on Conceptual Structures, and this is the seventh in the series, is the primary forum for these researchers to report their progress and activities. As in the past, the doors were open to admit alternate representation models and approaches.

The two-volume set originates from the Advanced Course on Petri Nets held in Dagstuhl, Germany in September 1996; beyond the lectures given there, additional chapters have been commissioned to give a well-balanced presentation of the state of the art in the area. Together with its companion volume "Lectures on Petri Nets I: Basic Models" this book is the actual reference for the area and addresses professionals, students, lecturers, and researchers who are - interested in systems design and would like to learn to use Petri nets familiar with subareas of the theory or its applications and wish to view the whole area - interested in learning about recent results presented within a unified framework - planning to apply Petri nets in practical situations - interested in the relationship of Petri nets to other models of concurrent systems.

The emerging Second-Generation Web is based entirely on XML and related technologies. It is intended to result in the creation of the Semantic Web, on which computers will be able to deal with the meaning ("semantics") of Web data and hence to process them in a more effective and autono mous way. This new version of the Web introduces a multitude of novel concepts, terms, and acronyms. Purpose, Scope and Methods This dictionary is an effort to specify the terminological basis of emerging XML and Semantic Web technologies. The ultimate goal of this dictionary is even broader than just to define the meaning of newwords - itaims to develop aproper understandingofthese leading-edge technologies. To achieve this, comprehensible definitions of technical terms are supported by numerous diagrams and code snippets, clearly annotated and explained. The main areas covered in this dictionary are: (1) XML syntax and core technologies, such as Namespaces, Infoset and XML Schema; (2) all the major membersofthe XML family oftechnologies, such as XSLT, XPath and XLink; (3) numerous XML-based domain-specific languages, such as NewsML (News Markup Language); (4) the concept and architecture of the Semantic Web; (5) key Semantic Web technologies,such as RDF (Resource Description Framework), RDF Schema and OWL (Web Ontology Language); and (6) Web services, including WSDL (Web Services Description Lan guage) and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol).

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Cooperative Information Systems, CIA'99, held in Uppsala, Sweden in July/August 1999. The 16 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 46 submissions. Also included are ten invited contributions by leading experts. The volume is divided in sections on information discovery and management on the Internet; information agents on the Internet-prototypes systems and applications; communication and collaboration, mobile information agents; rational information agents for electronic business; service mediation and negotiation; and adaptive personal assistance.

The papers in this volume were presented at the Sixth Workshop on Algorithms and Data Structures (WADS '99). The workshop took place August 11 - 14, 1999, in Vancouver, Canada. The workshop alternates with the Scandinavian Workshop on Algorithms Theory (SWAT), continuing the tradition of SWAT and WADS starting with SWAT'88 and WADS'89. In response to the program committee's call for papers, 71 papers were submitted. From these submissions, the program committee selected 32 papers for presentation at the workshop. In addition to these submitted papers, the program committee invited the following researchers to give plenary lectures at the workshop: C. Leiserson, N. Magnenat-Thalmann, M. Snir, U. Vazarani, and 1. Vitter. On behalf of the program committee, we would like to express our appreciation to the six plenary lecturers who accepted our invitation to speak, to all the authors who submitted papers to W ADS'99, and to the Pacific Institute for Mathematical Sciences for their sponsorship. Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to all the people who reviewed papers at the request of the program committee. August 1999 F. Dehne A. Gupta J.-R. Sack R. Tamassia VI Conference Chair: A. Gupta Program Committee Chairs: F. Dehne, A. Gupta, J.-R. Sack, R. Tamassia Program Committee: A. Andersson, A. Apostolico, G. Ausiello, G. Bilardi, K. Clarkson, R. Cleve, M. Cosnard, L. Devroye, P. Dymond, M. Farach-Colton, P. Fraigniaud, M. Goodrich, A.