FQAS is the premier conference for researchers and practitioners concerned with the vital necessity to provide easy, flexible, and intuitive access to information for every type of need. This multidisciplinary conference draws on several research areas, including databases, information retrieval, knowledge representation, soft computing, multimedia, and human-computer interaction. Held every two years, the conference provides a medium for exchanging scientific research and technological achievements accomplished by the international community. The previous events were held in Roskilde, Warsaw, and Copenhagen.

Invited Speakers
- Serge Abiteboul, INRIA France
- Yuzuru Tanaka, Hokkaido University Japan

Overall Theme and Topics of Interest
The overall theme of the FQAS conferences is innovative query systems aimed at providing easy, flexible and intuitive access to information. Such systems are intended to facilitate retrieval from information repositories such as databases, libraries, and the World Wide Web. These repositories are typically equipped with standard query systems, which are often inadequate, and the focus of FQAS is the development of query systems that are more expressive, informative, cooperative and productive. This conference is intended to attract individuals who are actively engaged both in theoretical and practical aspects of flexible, intelligent and intuitive access to information. The goal is to provide a platform for a useful exchange between theoreticians and practitioners, and to foster the cross-fertilization of ideas in the following areas:
- Database Management
- Information Retrieval
- Domain Modeling, Knowledge Representation and Ontologies
- Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining
- Artificial Intelligence
- Classical and Non-Classical Logics
- Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing
- Multimedia Information Systems
- Human-Computer Interaction

The conference is interested in papers in all areas of research related to its theme, including formal models, algorithms, applications, and experiments. In addition, we solicit papers dealing with Applications of flexible access to information in complex/novel domains, e.g. human genome, global change, manufacturing, health care, etc.

Submission Information
FQAS 2004 submissions generally must be in electronic form using the Portable Document Format (PDF) or Postscript and should be done through the FQAS 2004 web site: http://www.fqas2004.org Electronic abstract submission is required. The lenght of the paper must not exceed 12 pages (simple-spaced pages). Details on the submission process are available at http://www.fqas2004.org.

The FQAS 2004 proceedings will appear in Springer's Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI) series. Author instructions for preparing the submission and the camera ready can be found at http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html. At least one author should attend the conference to present the paper.

Important Dates
- Abstract submission: January 6, 2004
- Paper submission: January 12, 2004
- Notification: February 18, 2004
- Camera ready submission: March 20, 2004

A selected number of FQAS 2004 accepted papers will be expanded and revised for possible inclusion in Journal of Intelligent Information Systems by Kluwer, Information Processing & Management.