Information Director's Message
A Director is not supposed to actually do anything, so my
first official act has been to appoint some of the people who will be doing
the real work. I'm delighted that
Isabel Cruz,
Jim Gray,
Michael Ley and
Praveen Seshadri
have agreed to be Associate Information Directors for
SIGMOD. These people, plus
Mike Franklin
as SIGMOD Record Editor, form the
SIGMOD Online Editorial Board.
Jim will be coordinating with the ACM Preprint Database Committee led by
Joe Halpern. This is a high-priority area for SIGMOD Online, as we work
towards the objective of making any paper a database researcher or
practitioner may want available (and findable) online. Michael will ensure
that our efforts in this area are coordinated with his invaluable
Database
and Logic Programming Bibliography server at the University of Trier and
with the
ACM Digital Library.
Isabel will be in charge of providing content
from the SIGMOD and PODS conferences and particularly of expanding
multimedia content that can be made available online.
Praveen will be in charge of push technologies: taking over
dbworld, the indispensable resource that Raghu Ramakrishnan created and has
selflessly been maintaining, and extending it to provide a flexible and
powerful set of subscription services to SIGMOD members and the rest of the
community. This new mechanism will let us distribute the job of filtering
and moderating the stream of announcements and other content to a group of
people. As a step in this direction, instead of maintaining a list of
conference announcements on the web page, we have integrated
Renato
Busatto's repository at Aalborg University into the SIGMOD page.
Alexandros Labrinidis,
a student at the University of Maryland,
has taken over maintenance
of the SIGMOD
Record's web edition, and done a beautiful job of it.
The first step in building the new SIGMOD Online will be to revamp the
web site, with help from a professional design firm. At the end of 1997, ACM
radically redesigned its own site, to somewhat mixed reviews. We will soon
have to decide whether to follow their look and feel or strike out on our
own; stay tuned to
www.acm.org/sigmod!
Alberto Mendelzon
January, 1998
