Report on FQAS 2002: fifth international conference on flexible query answering systems

The overall theme of the FQAS conferences is innovative query systems that are aimed at providing easy, flexible and intuitive access to information. Such systems are intended to facilitate retrieval from information repositories such as databases, libraries, and the World Wide Web. These repositories are typically equipped with standard query systems, which are often inadequate, and the focus of FQAS is the development of query systems that are more expressive, informative, cooperative and productive.