Introduction

1 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.

Our goal in this workshop is to provide a forum for a critical assessment of the achievements of the information and data management research communities and an opportunity for cooperatively setting out an agenda for the coming years that meets the challenges that lie ahead. In bringing together the PIs and Co-PIs currently funded by the Information and Data Management Program (IDM) of the National Science Foundation (NSF) as representatives of these two communities, along with selected industry and government invitees, this workshop enables cooperation towards:

 
The workshop also aims at initiating future collaboration among researchers from the different research communities involved in IDM, including database research, information retrieval, and multi-modal information management. At the same time, the workshop will provide an opportunity to NSF program officers as well as other funding agencies and researchers from industry to learn more about the current research efforts and successes of the PIs funded by IDM.

It is our expectation that the findings of the workshop will help in formulating future directions of research in information and data management and will suggest promising modalities of research in academia and industry with an aim to foster innovation as well as technology transfer.
 
2 Workshop Structure

The structure of the workshop aims at achieving a balance between plenary presentations and smaller focus discussion groups. In this way, the wider sharing of information and achievements will constitute the context for the more in-depth discussions of selected issues within the discussion groups. There will be six discussion groups, each having two coordinators who will also participate in the writing of the final report that summarizes the findings of this meeting. These groups are (revised from the printed version to reflect the new names):

A. Next Generation Information Access
B. Information Representation and Visualization
C. Languages, Data Models and Application Models
D. New Environments and Data Management System Issues
E. Large-scale Open Environments of Autonomous Sources
F. Multi-modal Issues, Systems and Applications

As part of the plenary sessions, keynote speakers from The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the National Science Foundation, and from industry will address this meeting offering their viewpoints on the directions towards fruitful areas of research.

Also, a vision panel will present the contributions and successes of our fields involved in the IDM program, thus far, and discuss the continuing significance of our fields in the development of the future technologies and computer applications. The goal is to provoke thought and controversy amongst attendees by debating issues such as: what kinds of research questions should be considered intractable, and thus should not be funded? What will be cutting edge issues as the information age gains momentum? Which ones should be left behind? Which issues belong to the development community and which to research? What kinds of collaboration are needed? Has the IDM program addressed these key issues? What are the issues in common and where do we differ? Most important, where do we go from here?
 
3 Workshop Results

The proceedings at hand, which include reports of the projects currently funded by the IDM program, are the first result of this workshop and are a reflection of the many successes of the academic research communities sponsored by NSF. They are a valuable overview of the funding in the field, and of the issues that are being addressed. These proceedings as well as the findings of the workshop will also be widely disseminated in electronic form on the Web. For this purpose, a URL for the workshop has been set up at: http://www.cs.pitt.edu/~panos/idm98. Following the workshop, the findings and conclusions of the workshop will be gathered together in the form of a report to help in formulating future priorities in the information and data management research by NSF and other governmental and industrial funding agencies. This final report will be also made available on the workshop's web page and will be distributed in hard copy to lists of related research, funding, and government communities.

In addition to the proceedings and to the reports generated from the workshop itself, we anticipate other results which may be less tangible but no less significant. These include the kinds of understanding of the field that comes out of small group interaction on specific research topics. Although results like these are impossible to put into publications, we anticipate that they will nonetheless affect future directions in the field.

Steering Committee and Acknowledgements

The two co-chairs have technical expertise in the two areas of the IDM program, viz., data management and information management. The other two members of the steering committee are Prof. Stanley Zdonik from Brown University who brought along his vast experience both as a researcher and as one of the co-chairs of the CRA/NSF Sponsored Workshop on Strategic Directions in Computing Database Management Systems Working Group, and Prof. Daniel Barbara from George Mason University who has provided local arrangements. We would like to thank our honored speakers and panel members who have taken the time to prepare for their participation. We would also like to thank all our Co-PIs in IDM for preparing and sending us their reports. Finally, the opportunity to convene for this time has been supported by the National Science Foundation. In particular we acknowledge the careful input and encouragement from Dr. Maria Zemankova, the NSF IDM program director, who has helped along the way by offering valuable suggestions on both the workshop structure and its content.

We owe a particular debt of gratitude to David K. Evans who has tirelessly worked with us on maintaining the IDM web page, on helping process registration forms, on answering the many questions that arose as we were planning this meeting, and on producing the
proceedings. Dave is a first year graduate student at Columbia University, and is supported by IDM Funding. We also acknowledge the help of Susan Weissman Lauzac, another graduate student partially supported by IDM funding at the University of Pittsburgh, who has worked behind the scenes in helping to analyze and form the break-out groups. Both have done a fine job in helping with this workshop, and, we hope, have learned from it as well.

We are grateful for the time each attendee has given to the important task of helping to shape future directions in the information and data management field. We are all co-PI's in this task, which raises particular challenges in the fast-changing world in which we live. Our mission is to impact that future by giving our collective perspectives and views on these challenges.

The Workshop Co-Chairs,

                Panos K. Chrysanthis                              Judith L. Klavans
        Computer Science Department        Center for Research on Information Access
               University of Pittsburgh                            Columbia University
                   Pittsburgh, PA                                        New York, NY