Advances in Web-Age Information Management

are essential to the quality of the program. We are grateful to Weiyi Meng, X. Sean Wang, Stratis D. Viglas, and Je?rey Xu Yu for their valuable help in leading and monitoring the discussions on our behalf. We also thank Jun Yang for his work in preparing the proceedings. Finally, we are deeply indebted to Yu Zhang and Mengya Tang, the Web Masters, who took on tremendous pain and extra work, and ably modi?ed, extended and maintained the conference management tool; for three long months they worked until late night every day, seven days a week; the necessary extension of the tool also received help from Kun Jing, Chengchao Xie, Shiqi Peng, Heng Wang, Cheng Jin and Ruizhi Ye; without their hardande?ectiveworkthe onlinediscussionswouldnothavebeen possible, among other things. October 2005 Wenfei Fan, Zhaohui Wu Program Committee Co-chairs WAIM 2005 Dedication: Hongjun Lu (1945-2005) On behalf of the Program Committee, it is with sincere gratitude and great sorrow that we would like to dedicate WAIM 2005 proceedings to Hongjun Lu, who left us on March 3, 2005.
Hongjun was not only an excellent researcher and highly productive scholar of the database community, but also a wond- ful colleague and dear friend. For many years, he has been the ambassador for database research to China, and tremendously fostered the growth of this community.