This book constitutes the proceedings of the 23rd International Seminar on Current Trends in Theory and Practice of Informatics, SOFSEM '96, held in Milovy, Czech Republic, in November 1996. The volume presents a unique collection of 19 invited papers competently surveying the field. These papers are organized in sections on fundamentals, distributed and parallel computing, AI and control systems, databases and electronic documents, scientific computing and visualization, programming and software engineering. Also included are 22 refereed and thoroughly revised contributed research papers selected by the program committee for inclusion in the proceedings.