I would like to welcome you to Singapore and the 17th International Conf- enceonConceptualModeling(ER'98).Thisconferenceprovidesaninternational forum for technical discussion on conceptual modeling of information systems among researchers, developers and users. This is the ?rst time that this c- ference is held in Asia, and Singapore is a very exciting place to host ER'98. We hope that you will ?nd the technical program and workshops useful and stimulating. The technical program of the conference was selected by the distinguished program committee consisting of two co-chairs and 83 members. Credit for the excellent?nalprogramisduetoTokWangLingandSudhaRam.Specialthanks to Frederick H. Lochovsky for selecting interesting panels, and Alain Pirotte for preparation of attractive tutorials. I would also like to thank Yong Meng Teo (PublicityChair),andtheregionco-ordinators,AlbertoLaender,ErichNeuhold, Shiwei Tang, and Masaaki Tsubaki, for taking care of publicity. The following three workshops are also organized to discuss speci?c t- ics of data modeling and databases: "International Workshop on Data Wa- housing and Data Mining" organized by Sham Navathe (Workshop chair) and MukeshMohania(ProgramCommitteeChair),"InternationalWorkshoponNew Database Technologies for Collaborative Work Support and Spatio-Temporal DataManagement"organizedbyYoshifumiMasunaga,and"InternationalWo- shop on Mobile Data Access" organized by Dik L. Lee. Ee Peng Lim took care of all detailed work related to the workshops. I would like to thank all these people who organized the workshops as well as the members of program committees. The workshop proceedings will be published jointly after the workshop.