This volume reflects emerging research on the meaning of multimedia information, as presented during IFIP’s Eighth Data Semantics Working Conference (DS-8), organized by its Working Group 2.6 on databases, and held at Rotorua, New Zealand, in January 1999. DS-8 was planned as an active forum for researchers and practitioners focusing on those issues that involve the semantics of the information represented, stored, and manipulated by multimedia systems. Depending on the topic and state of research, issues may be covered either deeply theoretically or quite practically, or even both. These proceedings contain 21 papers carefully selected by an International Programme Committee and organized in six thematic areas: video data modelling and use; image databases; applications of multimedia systems; multimedia modelling in general; multimedia information retrieval; and semantics and metadata. For almost every area, important topics and issues include data modelling and query languages for media such as audio, video, and images; methodological aspects of multimedia database design; intelligent multimedia information retrieval; knowledge discovery and data mining in multimedia information; and multimedia user interfaces. Three keynote addresses, by famous experts Ramesh Jain, Hermann Maurer and Masao Sakauchi, set the stage for discussion and future directions for the field.