This volume contains the papers presented at the First International Sym- sium on Foundations
of Information and Knowledge Systems (FoIKS 2000) which was held in Burg Germany from
February 14th to 17th 2000. FoIKSis intendedto
beabiannualeventfocussingontheoreticalfoundations ofinformationandknowledgesystems.Itaims to
takeupthe oldtraditionofthe conferenceseries MathematicalFundamentals ofDatabaseSystems (MFDBS)
which encouraged East-West collaboration in the e ld of database theory. F- mer MFDBS
conferences were held in Dresden in 1987 (Springer LNCS 305 edited by Joachim Biskup J anos
Demetrovics Jan Paredaens and Bernhard Thalheim) in Visegr ad in 1989 (Springer LNCS 364
edited by J anos Demet- vics and Bernhard Thalheim) and in Rostock in 1991 (Springer LNCS 495
edited by Bernhard Thalheim Jan os Demetrovics and Hans-Detlef Gerhard). Another goal of the
MFDBS conference series has always been to attract researchers working in mathematical e lds
such as discrete mathematics c- binatorics logics and nite model theory who are interested
in applying their theories to researchon databaseand knowledgebase theory. To that end FoIKS
takes up the tradition of providing a forum for mathematical foundations in a speci c branch of
computer science. A r st attempt to reestablish the MFDBS tradition was made in 1995 with a
follow-up workshop Semantics in Datab- es to ICDT (Springer LNCS 1358 edited by Bernhard
Thalheim and Leonid Libkin).
