Database Semantics: Semantic Issues in Multimedia Systems reflects the state of the art of emerging research on the meaning of multimedia information, as presented during IFIP's Eighth Data Semantics Working Conference (DS-8), organized by its Working Group 2.6 on Databases, and held at Rotorua, New Zealand, in January 1999. DS-8 was planned as an active forum for researchers and practitioners focusing on those issues that involve the semantics of the information represented, stored, and manipulated by multimedia systems. Depending on the topic and state of research, issues may be covered either deeply theoretically or quite practically, or even both.
These proceedings contain twenty-one papers carefully selected by an International Programme Committee and organized in six thematic areas:

• Video Data Modelling and Use;
• Image Databases;
• Applications of Multimedia Systems;
• Multimedia Modeling in General;
• Multimedia Information Retrieval;
• Semantics and Metadata.
  For almost every area, important topics and issues include:
• data modeling and query languages for media such as audio, video, and images;
• methodological aspects of multimedia database design;
• intelligent multimedia information retrieval;
• knowledge discovery and data mining in multimedia information;
• multimedia user interfaces.

Three visionary keynote addresses, by famous experts Ramesh Jain, Hermann Maurer and Masao Sakauchi, set the stage for discussion and future directions for the field. The collection of papers that resulted now offers a glimpse of the excitement and enthusiasm from DS-8.
Database Semantics: Semantic Issues in Multimedia Systems is suitable as a secondary text for a graduate-level course on database systems, multimedia systems, or information retrieval systems and as a reference for practitioners and researchers in industry.