The Data Base Steel

The Fourth International Working Conference on Statistical and Scientific Data Base Management (IV SSDBM) held on June 21-23, 1988 in Rome, Italy, continued the series of conferences initiated in California in December 1981. The purpose of this conference was to bring together database researchers, users and system builders, working in this specific field, to discuss the particular points of interest, to propose new solutions to the problems of the domain and to expand the topics of the previous conferences, both from the theoretical and from the applicational point of view. The papers of four scientific sessions dealt with the following topics: knowledge base and expert system, data model, natural language processing, query language, time performance, user interface, heterogeneous data classification, storage constraints, automatic drawing, ranges and trackers, and arithmetic coding. Two other special sessions presented work on progress papers on geographical data modelling, spatial database queries, user interface in an Object Oriented SDB, interpretation of queries, graphical query language and knowledge browsing front ends. The conference also had three invited papers on topics of particular interest such as "Temporal Data", "Statistical Data Management Requirements" and "Knowledge Based Decision Support Systems", included in this volume. The introductory paper by M. Rafanelli provides both an introduction to the general concepts helpful to people outside the field and a survey of all the papers in these Proceedings. Furthermore, there were three open panels. Papers by the chairmen, contributions of the panelists and a summary of the respective discussions are included in this volume, too.

J.-E. Dubois and N. Gershon This book was inspired by the Symposium on "Communications and Computer Aided Systems" held at the 14th International CODATA Conference in September 1994 in Chambery, France. It was conceived and influenced by the discussions at the symposium and most of the contributions were written following the Conference. This is the first comprehensive book, published in one volume, of issues concerning the challenges and the vital impact of the information revolution (including the Internet and the World Wide Web) on science and technology. Topics concerning the impact of the information revolution on science and technology include: • Dramatic improvement in sharing of data and information among scientists and engineers around the world • Collaborations (on-line and off-line) of scientists and engineers separated by distance . • Availability of visual tools and methods to view, understand, search, and share information contained in data • Improvements in data and information browsing, search and access and • New ways of publishing scientific and technological data and information. These changes have dramatically modified the way research and development in science and technology are being carried out. However, to facilitate this information flow nationally and internationally, the science and technology communities need to develop and put in place new standards and policies and resolve some legal issues.