SIGMOD RECORD, Vol. 23, No. 4, December 1994


BEditor's Notes


This issue contains a special-issue section on Metadata for Digital Media 
as well as the regular feature of short articles, surveys, Database Research Funding, and Trade Press News. As usual we conclude  the issue with Announcements and Calls-for-Papers. 

The special issue  addresses a problem which is quite crucial for the 
understanding and the development of systems that have to deal with digital 
media such as voice, image, and audio. One of the key problems to be resolved in sharing of media data is the development of metadata. The special issue that was edited by W. Klas and A. Sheth contains seven excellent papers on this problem. A detailed overview of the research problem and the papers is given by the editors.

The submitted articles section contains three papers. In the first paper,
Hartmut Wedekind argues that a clean distinction should be made between the 
terms "Version" and "Variant" in industrial database applications like CAD/CAM.  His article focuses on whether the terms are used in an orthogonal fashion in the scientific literature. The second paper, by Martin Bertram, reports an 
improvement in the process of data modeling by extending  the set of applicable constructs and by providing a library of reusable constructs. This improvement is expected to lead to reduction in the effort to develop data models as well as increase the quality of the model schema. The third paper, by Dong Shin and Arnold Meltzer,  introduces a new join algorithm to increase the speed of the relational join operator. The algorithm uses a divide and conquer strategy and stack oriented filter techniques to remove non-qualifying tuples as early as possible. 

The Database Research Survey section includes a paper by Tom Barclay, Robert 
Barnes, Jim Gray, and Prakash Sundaresan. They describe a parallel database load prototype for Digital's Rdb database product. In the Database Standards section, Nelson Mattos and Linda G. DeMichiel describe design trade-offs in SQL3. 
In the Trade  Press section, Rafael Alonso has selected an article by B. Rosenblatt titled "UNIX RDBMS: The Next Generation" that describes the state of the relational market for UNIX systems. I would like to thank  the magazine Advanced Systems for allowing the reprint of the article in SIGMOD RECORD.

In the section on Database Funding Xiaolei Qian describes the recent requests 
for proposals from ARPA, NSF, NASA, SDI and NIST. As usual the issue concludes with  Announcements and Call for Papers.
 

Arie Segev
October, 1994


ERRATUM

In the table of contents on the front cover of the September issue of the
the RECORD, D. Barabara's name was mistakenly omitted from the list of authors
of the panel report on the Impact of Database Research on Industrial
Products