Classification in the Information Age

nd Selected papers presented at the 22 Annual Conference of the German Classification Society GfKI (Gesellschaft fUr Klassifikation), held at the Uni- versity of Dresden in 1998, are contained in this volume of "Studies in Clas- sification, Data Analysis, and Knowledge Organization" . One aim of GfKI was to provide a platform for a discussion of results con- cerning a challenge of growing importance that could be labeled as "Classi- fication in the Information Age" and to support interdisciplinary activities from research and applications that incorporate directions of this kind. As could be expected, the largest share of papers is closely related to classi- fication and-in the broadest sense-data analysis and statistics. Additionally, besides contributions dealing with questions arising from the usage of new media and the internet, applications in, e.g., (in alphabetical order) archeolo- gy, bioinformatics, economics, environment, and health have been reported.As always, an unambiguous assignment of results to single topics is some- times difficult, thus, from more than 130 presentations offered within the scientific program 65 papers are grouped into the following chapters and subchapters: * Plenary and Semi Plenary Presentations - Classification and Information - Finance and Risk * Classification and Related Aspects of Data Analysis and Learning - Classification, Data Analysis, and Statistics - Conceptual Analysis and Learning * Usage of New Media and the Internet - Information Systems, Multimedia, and WWW - Navigation and Classification on the Internet and Virtual Univ- sities * Applications in Economics