Puebla, Puebla, México
del 1 al 3 de octubre de 2003

Ubiquity and easy accessibility of data and resources is maybe the reason why some people believe that we are living in the information age. The availability of classical, multiform (different formats and structures) and multimedia (text, audio, image, video) data and tools (platforms, specification languages) encourages information sharing.

The particularity of this situation is that, under the risk of getting swallow up by such a great amount of information, new abstraction mechanisms must be proposed in order to be able to profit from the great opportunity of being able to exploit information according to specific requirements. Indeed, in a “globalized” context, data must be shared and exchanged for building applications that enrich and generate new data about data. Technology necessary for building information systems on heterogeneous data bases exists. Indeed, the diversity of models, prototypes and standards adopted for defining and exploiting information is a reality.

This diversity underlines the need of mediation infrastructures between data and applications. In order to answer to such need it is important to consider data characteristics (volume, multiform, multimedia, evolution, mobility, etc.), description models, languages and mechanisms that enable the development of applications using multimedia and multiform data. However, data integration must aim at providing a synthesized view of information considering the semantic which is implicit in specific application domains and requirements. Without having an abstraction of such aspects it will be impossible to exploit information and get benefits out of it (i.e., accurate decision making, pertinent prediction, global analysis of process evolution).

Current research in the DBMS domain tackles data exploitation focusing on: data mediation systems, query languages and optimization, consistency (transaction, synchronization, replication), security and confidentiality, physical integration (data warehouses and multidimensional data bases), data grids, interoperability and sources federation, cooperative systems, performance: indexation, search operators, parallelism, simulation, content and knowledge management, …