It is with great sorrow that we received the sad news of the sudden and untimely passing of Professor Yahiko Kambayashi, just before sending this pro- ceeding out for printing.

Professor Kambayashi, was an IEEE fellow, a trustee of the VLDB Endow- ment (1991-1996), and a winner of the 1995 ACM-SIGMOD contribution award. All of us know how much he meant to the database community, especially to the database researchers in this Asia-Pacific region. His sudden leave is not only a tragic loss to his family but also a great loss to the whole international database
community.

Despite of his busy schedule, Professor Kambayashi served as a program committee member of this conference. Together with all the members of organi- zation committee and program committee, we like to use this place to express our heartfelt condolence and our deepest sympathy to his family.

Hongjun Lu, Yanchun Zhang, Jeffrey X Yu, Xuemin Lin

Februray 6, 2004