Invited Talks -- The Esthetic Grounding of Ordered Thought -- Memes as Signs in the Dynamic Logic of Semiosis: Beyond Molecular Science and Computation Theory -- Graphics and Languages for the Flexible Modular Framework -- Implicational Concept Graphs -- Types and Tokens for Logic with Diagrams -- From Data to Conceptual Structures -- Concept-Based Data Mining with Scaled Labeled Graphs -- Iceberg Query Lattices for Datalog -- ‘Particles’ and ‘Waves’ as Understood by Temporal Concept Analysis -- A Void Type for Medical Language Disambiguation -- Clustering of Conceptual Graphs with Sparse Data -- Concept Lattices and Concept Graphs -- A Cartesian Closed Category of Approximable Concept Structures -- Implications in Triadic Formal Contexts -- Exploring Relational Structures Via -- An Extension of the Theory of Information Flow to Semiconcept and Protoconcept Graphs -- Negation in Contextual Logic -- Conceptual Frameworks for Applications -- Using Brandom’s Framework to Do Peirce’s Normative Science: Pragmatism as the Game of Harmonizing Assertions? -- Improving the Testbed Development Process in Collaboratories -- Relation Elements for the Semantic Web -- Poset Ontologies and Concept Lattices as Semantic Hierarchies -- Concept Types and Coreference in Simple Conceptual Graphs -- An Exportable CGIF Module from the CP Environment: A Pragmatic Approach -- Reasoning with Conceptual Structures -- Using Conceptual Graphs to Represent Agent Semantic Constituents -- Improving Generalization Level in UML Models Iterative Cross Generalization in Practice -- KNAML: A Knowledge Representation Language for Distributed Reasoning -- Interoperability of Ontologies Using Conceptual Graph Theory -- A Priorean Approach to Time Ontologies.

This volume contains selected papers presented at the 12th International C- ference on Conceptual Structures, ICCS 2004, held in Huntsville Alabama, July 19–23, 2004. The main theme of the conference, “Conceptual Structures at Work”, was chosen to express our intention of applying conceptual structures for hum- centered practical purposes. That invites us to develop not only clear conceptual theories,butalsomethodstosupporthumansintheapplicationofthesetheories in their societies. Some promising steps in this direction are being taken, but the gap between the researchers working on a highly sophisticated level on one side and the practitioners in many ?elds of applications on the other side is usually di?culttobridge.Someofushaveexperiencesinsuchpracticalcooperation,but we need more members of our community to be engaged in “real life problems”. We all know that solutions of complex problems in practice require not only a well-developed formal theory, but also an understanding of the whole context of the given problems. To support our understanding we need general philo- phical methods as well as formal theories for the representation of fundamental structures in practice. We believe that our community has powerful tools and methodsforsuccessfulapplicationsinpractice,butthatwemustdevelopaforum to present our results to a broader audience. First we must understand the s- ni?cant developments in our own group, which has activities in many directions of research.