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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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