This publication contains the proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Object-Oriented Information Systems. The first three OOIS conferences were held in London UK (1994), Dublin Ireland (1995) and again in London in 1996. In response to the Call for Papers we received 91 submissions which were reviewed by members of the Program Committee. Each paper was refereed by at least three reviewers, and following discussion with PC members, 40 of the papers were accepted for presentation at the conference, and for publication in this volume. In addition to the contributions from authors, this volume includes an abstract of the Keynote Speaker’s presentation. At OOIS’97 in Brisbane in November, Dr Dan Fishman, the Chief Architect for Informix Software Inc. , traced some of the early developments in information systems through current day technology, and further explored possible future directions and potential for object -oriented information systems. The papers included in the proceedings consist of various aspects of object-oriented concepts and they have been presented to the reader under the following thematic sections: Object Oriented Methodologies Query Processing Modelling Issues I Transaction Processing and Concurrency Control Applications Modelling Issues II Re-Usability I Modelling Issues III Re-usability II Architectural Issues Object Orientation in Spatial Structures Database Design and Views Software Engineering/Development Large Scale Environments This conference has received tremendous support from the School of Information Technology at The University of Queensland.