Welcome to the June 2002 issue. This is the first time that SIGMOD
Record has the June issue as a regular issue instead of SIGMOD
Proceedings. We have a full issue with seven regular articles, three
book reviews, two workshop reports, two reminiscences on influential
papers, and one contribution from each of the following five feature
columns: Database Principles, Distinguished Database Profiles,
Standards, Surveys, Systems and Prototypes.
In the regular research Articles section, the first paper discusses
the importance of ordering semantics in data processing and presents
an algebraic foundation for query optimizers to incorporate ordering
semantics into their existing frameworks. The second paper addresses
retrieval problems that the authors experienced in experimental
high-energy physics applications. An interesting index technique is
proposed based on space partitioning techniques for handling terabytes
or petabytes of multi-dimensional data. The third paper describes a
pictorial approach to querying geographic databases. The fourth and
fifth papers report author's experiences, as database researchers,
with two standard efforts - XQuery and MPEG-7. We also include the
part one of an article that reviews a representative collection of
methods for checking cluster validity in data mining. Part focuses on
external and internal criteria in judging cluster validity. This
section closes with an article describing an interesting approach to
map a ternary entity relationship to relational tables.
The Distinguished Database Profiles section features an interview with
David DeWitt by Marianne Winslett. David shared with us his
experiences and insights on a wide variety of issues that are of
general interests to the SIGMOD community, including the rethinking of
CS curriculum, research funding, DB theory, query optimization, and
supercomputing. The Book Reviews section contains three
contributions. The introduction, by Karl Aberer, provides a summary of
the reviews on the three data mining and data warehousing related
books published in recent years. This issue also includes a
comparison of several Web data extraction tools, by Alberto Laender
and his colleagues, in the Surveys section, an overview of the Phoenix
project, by Roger Barga and David Lomet, in the Systems & Prototypes
section. The Phoenix project in Microsoft research has been
developing solutions to providing application recovery efficiently and
transparently. The Standards section includes an article on the
progress of SQL/XML standard effort by Andrew Eisenberg and Jim
Melton. The issue ends with an interesting article by Ronald Fagin,
sharing his expertise and understanding on combining fuzzy
information.
I would like to thank the associate editors and the authors for their
invaluable contributions to this issue. I hope this issue will provide
some interesting Summer reading for SIGMOD members.
| Ling Liu |
| Atlanta, April 2002 |
|
