Goals of the Workshop

At the threshold of the new century, self-assessment is called for as part of any attempt to identify the challenges and objectives that will shape the research agenda of the future.  The recent advances in computer and network technologies that have enabled the emergence of an unprecedented number of new computer applications, present a new challenge to the ways data and information are used and managed.
However, it is not enough for the information management (often referred to as information retrieval) and data management (often referred to as database) research communities to each identify new research opportunities in isolation as has been the case so far, because the success with which this challenge will be met depends on the degree of cooperation between these two research communities.

The goals of this workshop are:

1. to convene members of the active IDM research community in anenvironment that permits us the chance to interact in a highly focussed and productive way, cooperatively setting out a visionary, yet realistic, research agenda for the future.
2. to encourage interdisciplinary interaction between the structured database, unstructured database, and information retrieval communities.
3. to enable funded researchers to both evaluate the efficacy of the IDM program as it stands, highlight its many successes, and, more importantly, to identify areas for improvement and help influence future directions for funding.
4. to permit researchers to be informed of targeted government  strategic directions,
5. to permit other funding agencies and industry invitees to find out what active research is under way under the NSF program and about community-generated research directions.