Last year, we mentioned that it was the aim of DiSC to become the ``most comprehensive and timely source of information on database research.'' DiSC '00 has already obtained this objective, by including the full contents of the proceedings of SIGMOD/PODS '99, VLDB '99, ICDE '99, KDD '99, CoopIS '99, DOA '99, DASFAA '99, SSDBM '99, WebDB '99, and of the 1999 NSF Information and Data Management Workshop. The presentation slides and other material for various invited talks, tutorials, demonstrations, and panels of SIGMOD/PODS, VLDB, CoopIS, and the EDBT Summer School are also part of DiSC '00, as is the video of the SIGMOD/PODS keynote address by Dr. Theodore Berger (U. of Southern California).

In this issue of DiSC, there are 3,792 HTML documents, 663 PDF files, 2,300 image files, and over 14,000 links. To assemble this large, heterogeneous, and distributed multimedia data, we used a research prototype, called PANDA - A Publishing Assistant for Networked Document Assembly - developed in the ADVIS Lab at WPI. All the information presented in DiSC '00 was extracted, transformed, ``data cleaned," and finally integrated in a single XML format using PANDA.

We hope you will enjoy the material herein and we welcome your comments and suggestions at our DiSC feedback site.

Isabel F. Cruz
Founding Editor

Worcester, March 27, 2000