Preface to ETheCoM 2009

The aim of the first international workshop on " Evolving Theories of Conceptual Modelling " (ETheCoM) was to bring together researchers with an interest in theoretical foundations of conceptual modelling. The emphasis is on evolving theories that address mathematical and logical underpinnings of new developments in conceptual modelling, e.g. addressing service-oriented software systems, personalisation of Information Systems and services, network-centric and web-based applications, biomedical applications, games and entertainment, etc. We were interested in precise semantics, in particular with respect to constraints, and in the usage of such semantics for the reasoning and inferencing about model properties. The call for papers solicited submissions addressing theories of concepts, mathematical semantics of service-oriented systems, integrity constraints maintenance and dependency theory, theoretical foundations of personalisation of Information Systems and services, formal semantics of network-centric and web-based applications, formal methods for data and knowledge base design, reasoning about data and knowledge base dynamics, logical and mathematical models for novel application areas, adaptivity for personalised data and knowledge bases, formal information integration in data and knowledge bases, knowledge discovery in data and knowledge bases, formal linguistics for data and knowledge bases and others. A total number of 16 full papers was submitted to the workshop. Each paper was reviewed by three or four members of the international programme committee, and we finally selected the five best rated submissions for presentation at the workshop. Hermann Haeusler from Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. We wish to thank all authors of submitted papers and all workshop participants, without whom the workshop would not have been possible. In particular, we would like to thank Edward Hermann Haeusler and Bernhard Thalheim for their willingness to give invited presentations at the workshop. We are grateful to the members of the programme committees for their timely expertise in carefully reviewing the submissions. Finally, our thanks go to the organisers of ER 2009 and the workshop chairs Carlos Heuser and Günther Pernul for giving us the opportunity to organize this workshop.