I am indebted to several members of the ADVIS Research Group, namely to Don Lambe, Shereen Abdallah, and Rahul Battacharya. Don, the DiSC Production Director, made everything work smoothly. Don's exquisite taste and solid software practice are again patent in this issue of DiSC. He also produced the videos of the SIGMOD/PODS plenary and keynote talks. Shereen helped in many ways and was instrumental in meeting the tight deadline. Rahul designed the animation and contributed to other production aspects.

I would like to thank the SIGMOD and PODS general chairs and program committee chairs, Susan Davidson, Christos Faloutsos, Victor Vianu, and Christos Papadimitrou for their help. Susan Davidson also made the necessary arrangements for the (analog) video capture of the keynote talks.

I am grateful to the DiSC associate editors and in particular to Luis Gravano and Divesh Srivastava for editing the SIGMOD and VLDB demos and to Michael Ley for contributing the DBLP bibliography. Tova Milo gathered the papers of the WebDB workshop, Tamer Özsu provided the slides for the Panel on Data Management Issues in Electronic Commerce, Renée Miller assembled several of the tutorial and invited talk slides, and Alon Levy collected the slides for some of the SIGMOD Industrial Talks.

I would also like to thank the VLDB endowment, the IEEE, the SIGKDD, and in general all the organizers and program chairs who gave us the permission to include the contents of the conference and workshop proceedings featured in DiSC '00. Special thanks to Alfonso Cardenas and Ed Fox who edited the NSF IDM '99 workshop web site contents, and to all the authors who provided us with unique material of their invited talks, tutorials, demos, and other presentations.

At the ACM, I would like to thank Heather Levell, Deborah Cotton, and Jono Hardjowirogo for their logistic help and Dennis Ahlgrim for designing the cover and imprint of DiSC.

I gratefully acknowledge the ACM and the NSF for providing partial financial support to DiSC and to the ADVIS Research Group, respectively.

Finally, I would like to express a special thank you to my brother, Manuel Fernandes, for his beautiful interpretation of Schubert's Impromptu D 899 (Op.90) No.3 (in G flat major), which provides the musical background for the DiSC '00 trailer.

Isabel Cruz
Founding Editor

Worcester, March 27, 2000