On behalf of the Organizing Committee, we would like to welcome you to the proccedings of the 23rd International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER 2004). This conference provided an international forum for technical discussion on conceptual modeling of information systems among researchers, developers and users. This was the third time that this conference was held in Asia; the ?rst time was in Singapore in 1998 and the second time was in Yokohama, Japan in 2001. China is the third largest nation with the largest population in the world. Shanghai, the largest city in China and a great metropolis, famous in Asia and throughout the world, is therefore a most appropriate location to host this conference. This volume contains papers selected for presentation and includes the two keynote talks by Prof. Hector Garcia-Molina and Prof. Gerhard Weikum, and an invited talk by Dr. Xiao Ji. This volume also contains industrial papers and demo/poster papers. An additional volume contains papers from 6 workshops.
The conference also featured three tutorials: (1) Web Change Management andDelta Mining: Opportunities andSolutions,by SanjayMadria,(2)A Survey of Data Quality Issues in Cooperative Information Systems, by Carlo Batini, and (3) Visual SQL - An ER-Based Introduction to Database Programming,by Bernhard Thalheim.