This volume constitutes the proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications (DEXA), held in Prague, Czech Republic, in September 1993. Traditionally the objective of the DEXA conferences is to serve as an international forum for the discussion and exchange of research results and practical experinece among theoreticians and professionals working in the field of database and artificial intelligence technologies. Despite the fact that in the conference title the applications aspect is mentioned explicitly, the theoretical and the practical points of view in the field are well-balanced in the program of DEXA'93. The growing importance of the conference series is outlined by the remarkably high number of 269 submissions and by the support given by renown organizations. DEXA'93 is held for the first time outside the former GDR in an East-European country, and is essentially contributing to the advancement of the East-West scientific cooperation in the field of database and AI systems. This proceedings contains the 78 contributed papers carefully selected by an international program committee with thesupport of a high number of subreferees. The volume is organized in sectionson data models, distributed databases, advanced database aspects, database optimization and performance evaluation, spatial and geographic databases, expert systems and knowledge engineering, legal systems, other database and artificial intelligence applications, software engineering, and hypertext/hypermedia and user interfaces.
