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.