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Volume 30 Number 1
March 2001 |
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Welcome to my first issue as
editor-in-chief of the SIGMOD Record. I would like to
thank Mike Franklin, our outgoing editor-in-chief, for
the truly wonderful job he has done during the past four
years and for his help with the editorial transition
process. Under Mike's leadership, the Record has
achieved an unprecedented level of excellence, including
the introduction of several regular feature sections
(e.g., Database principles, Influential papers), the
timely publication of each issue, as well as the new
cover and layout. An important challenge for me is to
maintain the high standards that Mike has set. In
addition, I thank Rick Snodgrass, the SIGMOD chair, for
his encouragement and being an inspirational role model.
My thanks are also due to the associate editors Jose
Blakeley, Andrew Eisenberg, Leonid Libkin, Jim Melton,
Jignesh Patel, Ken Ross, Len Seligman, Amit Sheth, and
the web master Alexandros Labrinidis for their continued
support through the transition in editorship.
Looking towards the future, I am excited about the
opportunity to serve the SIGMOD community in this
capacity. I plan to keep on the general structure of the
Record, combining solicited contributions with a
selection of papers from submitted articles. Another
important challenge for all of us is to continue the
growth and enhancement of the Record. Several new
columns and special issue sections have been proposed.
As the editor, I invite you, dear readers, to send me
your ideas and suggestions, so we can work together to
improve the Record further, and I encourage you, members
of the database community, to submit research articles
or materials for our feature sections or special issue
sections.
The present issue contains a number of contributions
that I hope you will find interesting. It begins with
six technical articles. Topics covered range from XML
and wireless Web, querying, indexing, and distance-based
applications in multi-dimensional data management, to
system support for distributed information flows,
quality of service and knowledge management in digital
libraries. Following the articles, the Database
Principles section presents a paper discussing the roles
of constraints in managing semi-structured data and XML
data. The Influential Papers section consists of
reminiscences by five contributors, including a paper
that the contributor didn't like initially, and a paper
that took seven years to appear. We also have three
reports from the workshop on XML-enabled Wide Area
Searches for Bioinformatics, the ACM SIGIR workshop on
XML and Information Retrieval, and the fourth
international conference on Flexible Query Answering
Systems. Other highlights include an article in the
Standards section, describing how applications can use
standard SQL to concurrently access their SQL data and
non-SQL data, and a Systems and Prototypes contribution
describing a joint research project on managing
heterogeneity with researchers from IBM Almaden Research
Center and University of Toronto.
Hope you enjoy this issue and will support the Record
with your contributions. Thank you.
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