Metainformatics

This volume contains the ?nal proceedings of the MetaInformatics Symposium 2003 (MIS 2003). The event was held September 17-20 on the campus of the Graz University of Technology in Graz, Austria. As with previous events in the MIS series, MIS 2003 brought together - searchers and practitioners from a wide variety of ?elds to discuss a broad range of topics and ideas related to the ?eld of computer science. The contributions that were accepted to and presented at the symposium are of a wide variety. Theyrangefromtheoreticalconsiderationsofimportantmetainformatics-related questions and issues to practical descriptions of approaches and systems that - fer assistance in their resolution. I hope you will ?nd the papers contained in this volume as interesting as the other members of the program committee and Ihave. These proceedings would not have been possible without the help and ass- tance of many people. In particular I would like to acknowledge the assistance of Springer-Verlag inHeidelberg, Germany, especially Anna Kramer, the computer science editor, and Alfred Hofmann, the executive editor for the LNCS series.