This book constitutes the ?rst volume of the ?rst journal in the new
LNCS Jo- nalSubline, theJournalonDataSemantics.
Publishingajournalinabookseries might come as a surprise to customers,
readers, and librarians, thus we would like to provide some background
information and our motivation for introducing this new LNCS subline. As
a consequence of the very tight interaction between the Lecture Notes in
ComputerScienceseriesandtheinternationalcomputerscienceresearchand-
velopment community, we receive quite a few proposals for new archive
journals. From the successful launch of workshops or conferences and
publication of their proceedings in the LNCS series, it might seem like
a natural step to approach the publisher about launching a journal once
this speci?c ?eld has gained a c- tain level of maturity and stability.
Each year we receive about a dozen such proposals and even more informal
inquiries. Like other publishers, it has been our experience that
launching a new jo- nal and making it a long-term success is a hard job
nowadays, due to a generally di?cult market situation, and library
budget restrictions in particular. Because many of the proceedings in
LNCS, and especially many of the LNCS postp- ceedings, apply the same
strict reviewing and selection criteria as established journals, we
started discussing with proposers of new journals the alternative of
devoting a few volumes in LNCS to their ?eld, instead of going through
the painful Sisyphean adventure of establishing a new journal on its own
