FQAS is the premier conference focusing on the key issue in the information society of providing easy, flexible, and intuitive access to information to everybody. In targeting this issue, the conference draws on several research areas, such as information retrieval, database management, information filtering, knowledge representation, soft computing, management of multimedia information, and human-computer interaction. The conference provides a unique opportunity for researchers, developers and practitioners to explore new ideas and approaches in a multidisciplinary forum. The previous FQAS events were held in 1994, 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, 2004, and 2006.

The FQAS conference invites papers in all the above mentioned areas as well as in the 2009 theme area: background knowledge. Background knowledge is knowledge that complements the primary target data with information that is essential to the understanding of this. Background knowledge can take various forms from simple lists of words to formal representations. Examples are vocabularies, lexica, dictionaries, ontologies, grammars, axiomatic domain knowledge, statistics on instances and use, etc. The key problem of this theme is how to apply background knowledge so as to better identify and respond to the user’s needs.

The overall topic of the FQAS conferences is innovative query systems aimed at providing easy, flexible and human-freindly access to information. Such systems are becoming increasingly important also due to the huge and allways growing number of users as well as the growing amount of available information.
GENERAL CO-CHAIRS

* Troels Andreasen, Computer Science, Roskilde University, Denmark
* Ronald R. Yager, Machine Intelligence Institute, Iona College, USA

TOPICS OF INTEREST
We invite submission of original research contributions, and proposals for invited sessions, panels, and tutorials. Contributions are encouraged from all areas, as long as they address central issues in flexible query answering systems. Topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

* Database management
* Information Retrieval
* Information extraction
* Text and data mining
* Knowledge representation
* Domain Modeling,
* Modeling user context
* Ontologies
* Semantic Web
* Ontology based query answering
* Human-Computer Interaction
* Artificial Intelligence
* Classical and Non-Classical Logics
* Natural Language Processing
* Reasoning under uncertainty
* Soft Computing

IMPORTANT DATES
Paper Submission

29th May 2009

Notification

13th Juli 2009

Final paper due

10th August 2009

Conference Date

26th-28th October 2009

FURTHER INFORMATION
All accepted papers will be published by Springer-Verlag in their Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI). Authors are invited to submit original previously unpublished research papers written in English, of up to 12 pages, strictly following the LNCS/LNAI format guidelines. Authors can download the Latex (recommended) or Word templates available at Springer's web site. Submissions not following the format guidelines will be rejected without review.