Database and Expert Systems Applications : 8th International Conference DEXA 97 Toulouse France September 1 5 1997 Proceedings This book contains the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications DEXA 97 held in Toulouse France September 1997. The 62 revised full papers presented in the book together with three invited contributions were selected from a total of 159 submissions. The papers are organized in sections on modeling object oriented databases active and temporal aspects images integrity constraints multimedia databases deductive databases and knowledge based systems allocation concepts data interchange digital libraries transaction concepts learning issues optimization and performance query languages maintenance federated databases uncertainty handling and qualitative reasoning and software engineering and reusable software