Current research in Visual Database Systems can be characterized by scalability, multi-modality of interaction, and higher semantic levels of data. Visual interfaces that allow users to interact with large databases must scale to web and distributed applications. Interaction with databases must employ multiple and more diversified interaction modalities, such as speech and gesture, in addition to visual exploitation. Finally, the basic elements managed in modern databases are rapidly evolving, from text, images, sound, and video, to compositions and now annotations of these media, thus incorporating ever-higher levels and different facets of semantics.In addition to visual interfaces and multimedia databases, Visual and Multimedia Information Management includes research in the following areas:

Keynote Papers.- Hyperdatabases.- Federated Information Systems for Communities.- Relevance Feedback in CBIR.- Invited Paper.- An Overview of Oracle Chart Builder and Mapviewer.- Papers.- Som-Based K-Nearest Neighbors Search in Large Image Databases.- Partial Image Retrieval Using Color Regions and Spatial Relationships.- High-Dimensional Image Indexing Based on Adaptive Partitioning and Vector Approximation.- The Segmentation and Classification of Story Boundaries in News Video.- Architecture and Implementation of an Interactive Tool for the Design and Visualization of Active Capability.- Indexing Images in High-Dimensional and Dynamic-Weighted Feature Spaces.- Modeling Multimedia Displays Using Action Based Temporal Logic.- An Entropy-Based Approach to Visualizing Database Structure.- Visual Query Processing for GIS with Web Contents.- Spatio-Temporal Modelling and Querying Video Databases Using High-Level Concepts.- Perfect Line Simplification for Visualization in Digital Cartography.- Balancing Fidelity and Performance in Virtual Walkthrough.- Aural Interfaces to Databases Based on VoiceXML.- Visual Querying in Geographic Information Systems.- Automatic Annotation and Retrieval of Images.- Visualization of Web-Based Australian Export Trading.- The Metric Histogram: A New and Efficient Approach for Content-Based Image Retrieval.- Designing Dynamic Web Pages in the Wysiwyg Interface.- Improving Image Retrieval with Semantic Classification Using Relevance Feedback.- Oral-Query-by-Sketch: An XML-Based Framework for Speech Access to Image Databases.- Querying Video Data by Spatio-Temporal Relationships of Moving Object Traces.- Multi-View Combined Visual Similarity Retrieval for Face Database.- DVQ: A DTD-Driven Visual Query Interface for XML Database Systems.- Modelling and Indexing of Fuzzy Complex Shapes.