This volume contains the papers selected for presentation at the 17th Inter- tional Symposium on Methodologies for Intelligent Systems (ISMIS 2008), held in York University, Toronto, Canada, May 21-23, 2008. ISMIS is a conference series started in 1986. Held twice every three years, ISMIS provides an inter- tional forum for exchanging scienti?c research and technological achievements in building intelligent systems. Its goal is to achieve a vibrant interchange – tween researchers and practitioners on fundamental and advanced issues related to intelligent systems. ISMIS 2008featureda selectionof latestresearchworkandapplicationsfrom the following areas related to intelligent systems: active media human-computer interaction, autonomic and evolutionary computation, digital libraries, intel- gent agent technology, intelligent information retrieval, intelligent information systems, intelligent language processing, knowledge representation and integ- tion, knowledge discovery and data mining, knowledge visualization, logic for arti?cial intelligence, soft computing, Web intelligence, and Web services. – searchers and developers from 29 countries submitted more than 100 full – pers to the conference. Each paper was rigorously reviewed by three committee members and external reviewers. Out of these submissions, 40% were selected as regular papers and 22% as short papers. ISMIS 2008 also featured three plenary talks given by John Mylopoulos, Jiawei Han and Michael Lowry. They spoke on their recent research in age- oriented software engineering, information network mining, and intelligent so- ware engineering tools, respectively.