Impact of objected oriented thinking on ER modeling -- Translation schemes and the fundamental problem of database design -- Schema design and knowledge discovery -- Decomposition of relationships through pivoting -- Understanding the implementation of IS-A relations -- Deductive object oriented schemas -- Verification problems in conceptual workflow specifications -- Process knowledge modeling -- The conceptual database design optimizer CoDO — Concepts, implementation, application -- ConQuer: A conceptual query language -- Using structural recursion as query mechanism for data models with references -- A modular design strategy for a flexible graphical database design environment: An experimental study -- Graph based modeling and implementation with EER/GRAL -- On the applicability of schema integration techniques to database interoperation -- Integration of inheritance trees as part of view generation for database federations -- A formal basis for dynamic schema integration -- Graphical Entity Relationship models: Towards a more user understandable representation of data -- Benefits and quality of data modelling — Results of an empirical analysis -- Normative language approach a framework for understanding -- Improving quality in conceptual modelling by the use of schema transformations -- An approach to maintaining optimized relational representations of entity-relationship schemas -- Transforming conceptual models to object-oriented database designs: Practicalities, properties, and peculiarities -- Representing partial spatial information in databases -- Specification of calendars and time series for temporal databases -- View-centered conceptual modelling -- Reverse engineering of relational database physical schemas -- Extracting n-ary relationships through database reverse engineering -- Inheritance as a conceptual primitive -- IO2 an algorithmic method for building inheritance graphs in object database design -- Workflow evolution -- A model for classification structures with evolution control -- Integrating versions in the OMT models.

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling, ER '96, held in Cottbus, Germany, in October 1996. The volume presents three invited contributions together with 29 revised full papers selected from 110 submissions. The papers cover all current aspects of the entity-relationship approach and conceptual modeling; they are organized in sections on advanced schema design, processes, query languages, representation, integration, principles of database design, transformation, enhanced modelling, capturing design information, and evolution.