Constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th International Symposium on Methodologies for Intelligent Systems, ISMIS 2008, held in Toronto, Canada, in May 2008. This book includes sections on knowledge discovery and data mining: foundations, advances, mining changes and actional patterns.

This volume contains the papers selected for presentation at the 17th Inter- tional Symposium on Methodologies for Intelligent Systems (ISMIS 2008), held in York University, Toronto, Canada, May 21–23, 2008. ISMIS is a conference series started in 1986. Held twice every three years, ISMIS provides an inter- tional forum for exchanging scienti?c research and technological achievements in building intelligent systems. Its goal is to achieve a vibrant interchange - tween researchers and practitioners on fundamental and advanced issues related to intelligent systems. ISMIS 2008featureda selectionof latestresearchworkandapplicationsfrom the following areas related to intelligent systems: active media human–computer interaction, autonomic and evolutionary computation, digital libraries, intel- gent agent technology, intelligent information retrieval, intelligent information systems, intelligent language processing, knowledge representation and integ- tion, knowledge discovery and data mining, knowledge visualization, logic for arti?cial intelligence, soft computing, Web intelligence, and Web services. - searchers and developers from 29 countries submitted more than 100 full - pers to the conference. Each paper was rigorously reviewed by three committee members and external reviewers. Out of these submissions, 40% were selected as regular papers and 22% as short papers. ISMIS 2008 also featured three plenary talks given by John Mylopoulos, Jiawei Han and Michael Lowry. They spoke on their recent research in age- oriented software engineering, information network mining, and intelligent so- ware engineering tools, respectively.