Elisa Bertino is a well known expert in the integration of AI and database techniques, areas of O-O, distributed, deductive and multimedia databases and database security. She has chaired and given tutorials at many international conferences and published hundreds of journal papers and a book. Elisa is currently a professor of computer science at the University of Milan. Barbara Catania is an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Genova, specializing in deductive and multimedia databases, and indexing techniques in object-oriented and constraint databases. She has presented at a number of international conferences and co-authored a book. Gian Piero Zarri is an internationally renowned consultant and researcher in the areas of knowledge-based systems, natural-language processing, databases and information retrieval systems. He is on the editorial board of a number of international scientific journals and on the program committee of many conferences on Knowledge-Based Systems. Gian Piero currently works as Research Director for CNRS, the French National Centre for Scientific Research.