This volume contains the papers selected for presentation at the Twelfth - ternational Symposium on Methodologies for Intelligent Systems - ISMIS 2000, held in Charlotte, N.C., 11{14 October, 2000. The symposium was co-organized by the College of Information Technology at UNC-Charlotte and the Polish- Japanese Institute of Information Technology. It was sponsored by the US Army Research O ce, NCR Data Mining Laboratory, College of IT at UNC-Charlotte, and others. ISMIS is a conference series that was started in 1986 in Knoxville, Tennessee. Since then it has been held in Charlotte (North Carolina), Knoxville (Tennessee), Torino (Italy), Trondheim (Norway), Warsaw (Poland), and Zakopane (Poland). The program committee selected the following major areas for ISMIS 2000: Evolutionary Computation, Intelligent Information Retrieval, Intelligent Inf- mation Systems, Knowledge Representation and Integration, Knowledge Dis- very and Learning, Logic for Arti cial Intelligence, and Methodologies. The contributed papers were selected from 112 full draft papers by the f- lowing program committee: A. Biermann, P. Bosc, J. Calmet, S. Carberry, N. Cercone, J. Chen, W. Chu, B. Croft, J. Debenham, S.M. Deen, K. DeJong, R. Demolombe, B. Desai, T. Elomaa, F. Esposito, A. Giordana, J. Grzymala-Busse, M. Hadzikadic, H. Hamilton, D. Hislop, K. Hori, W. Kloesgen, Y. Kodrato , J. Komorowski, J. Koronacki, W. Kosinski, R. Kosto , B.G.T. Lowden, D. Maluf, D. Malerba, R.L. de Mantaras, S. Matwin, R. Meersman, Z. Michalewicz, R.
