This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Foundations of Information and Knowledge Systems, held in February 2006. The 14 revised full papers presented together with three revised short papers and one invited paper were carefully reviewed and selected from 54 submissions. Among the topics covered are the theoretical foundations of information and knowledge systems, as well as mathematical fields such as discrete mathematics, combinatorics, logics and finite model theory, and applications thereof for research on database and knowledge base theory.

Inhalt

Invited Presentation.- The Semijoin Algebra.- Regular Papers.- Equational Constraint Solving Via a Restricted Form of Universal Quantification.- Modeling the Evolution of Objects in Temporal Information Systems.- Controlled Query Evaluation with Open Queries for a Decidable Relational Submodel.- Iterative Modification and Incremental Evaluation of Preference Queries.- On the Number of Independent Functional Dependencies.- Arity and Alternation: A Proper Hierarchy in Higher Order Logics.- Solving Abduction by Computing Joint Explanations: Logic Programming Formalization, Applications to P2P Data Integration, and Complexity Results.- The Nested List Normal Form for Functional and Multivalued Dependencies.- Axiomatising Functional Dependencies for XML with Frequencies.- Guarded Open Answer Set Programming with Generalized Literals.- Reasoning Support for Expressive Ontology Languages Using a Theorem Prover.- Consistency Checking Algorithms for Restricted UML Class Diagrams.- Some Contributions to the Minimum Representation Problem of Key Systems.- On Multivalued Dependencies in Fixed and Undetermined Universes.- Preference-Based Query Tuning Through Refinement/Enlargement in a Formal Context.- Processing Ranked Queries with the Minimum Space.- Hybrid Minimal Spanning Tree and Mixture of Gaussians Based Clustering Algorithm.