The lion's share of this issue is dedicated to a special section on
Electronic Commerce, which has been edited by Prof. Asuman Dogac of
the Middle East Technical University. E-Commerce is a key emerging
area in which the database community can and should make important
contributions. The papers presented here comprise a wide-ranging
overview of the many issues that need to be addressed. Asuman did a
great job on this section, choosing ten papers from the large number
of submissions she received in response to the Call For Papers (as
well as some arm twisting at E-Commerce workshops and conferences
around the world). Asuman managed the review and revision process,
resulting in the excellent section we have here. I thank her for the
time and hard work she put into it, and I encourage others of you to
come up with suggestions for future special sections.
This issue also contains a report on future directions in database
research from a meeting held at Asilomar this past August, which was
organized by Jim Gray and Michael Stonebraker. The timing for this
particular meeting was motivated by the fact that it had been ten
years since the widely-discussed Laguna Beach meeting (which was
reported in the March 1989 issue of SIGMOD Record). While the
Asilomar report is intentionally less controversial than its
predecessor, it does include some very strong opinions about where the
field should be going. In particular, there was wide agreement that
database researchers, reviewers, and conference organizers need to
focus on more speculative research (i.e., problems with a ten year or
longer horizon) and to expand their areas of interest beyond the scope
of today's commercial database systems. In fact, it is important to
note that the ``Grand Challenge'' posed at the end of the report does
not contain the word ``database''. The hope is that the report can
contribute to the ongoing process of defining the research agenda for
our research community.
The issue is rounded out with another excellent Standards column by
Andrew Eisenberg and Jim Melton, the always interesting ``Influential
Papers'' feature put together by Rick Snodgrass, and a timely paper on
the state of Middleware systems by David Ritter, which was obtained
for the Industry Perspectives column by Len Seligman. Finally, I am
sorry to announce that we will no longer be able to rely upon the
valuable assistance of Yvette Smith, who has done a great job
organizing the production of SIGMOD Record over the past couple of
years. Yvette is moving on to a new job starting in November. I'd
like to thank Yvette for her help and wish her the best of luck in her
new career.
Michael Franklin
October, 1998
