The Fourth International Working Conference on Statistical and Scientific Data Base Management (IV SSDBM) held on June 21-23, 1988 in Rome, Italy, continued the series of conferences initiated in California in December 1981. The purpose of this conference was to bring together database researchers, users and system builders, working in this specific field, to discuss the particular points of interest, to propose new solutions to the problems of the domain and to expand the topics of the previous conferences, both from the theoretical and from the applicational point of view. The papers of four scientific sessions dealt with the following topics: knowledge base and expert system, data model, natural language processing, query language, time performance, user interface, heterogeneous data classification, storage constraints, automatic drawing, ranges and trackers, and arithmetic coding. Two other special sessions presented work on progress papers on geographical data modelling, spatial database queries, user interface in an Object Oriented SDB, interpretation of queries, graphical query language and knowledge browsing front ends. The conference also had three invited papers on topics of particular interest such as "Temporal Data", "Statistical Data Management Requirements" and "Knowledge Based Decision Support Systems", included in this volume. The introductory paper by M. Rafanelli provides both an introduction to the general concepts helpful to people outside the field and a survey of all the papers in these Proceedings. Furthermore, there were three open panels. Papers by the chairmen, contributions of the panelists and a summary of the respective discussions are included in this volume, too.
