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ACM SIGMOD Digital Symposium Collection, DiSC, is a comprehensive collection of periodicals in the areas of databases and information management. This sixth issue of DiSC, DiSC'04, includes tens of Conferences, Symposiums, Workshops, and Journals. It also includes videos of two invited keynote addresses and the ten-year best paper awardee lecture delivered at VLDB 2003. Many included forums are from 2003, and a few from 2000, 2001, and 2002. These material are published by VLDB Endowment, ACM, IEEE, Kluwer and Springer. DiSC'04 is the result of a collaboration among DiSC's associate editors who compile the contents of different conferences. As a new editor, I am impressed by both the amount of data and the distributed nature of the collaboration. This release of DiSC was created using DiSCGenesis, a web-based infrastructure that empowers editors to upload content and collaborate with one another. Montra, a Los Angeles based company, implemented this infrastructure and offered it as a service. Montra deserves special thanks for its wonderful creative work to make DiSCGenesis a timely reality. With this infrastructure in place, the quality of DiSC is dictated by the associate editors who populate the system. The editorial board has done a tremendous job in a short period of time and I am thankful for each member's service. DiSC incurs significant expenses for its production. Without an industrial sponsor, these expenses would quickly bankrupt a Special Interest Group such as MOD. Microsoft is the industrial sponsor of DiSC'04. I am grateful and thankful to Microsoft for supporting DiSC'04. In particular, Dr. Jim Gray of Microsoft was quick to respond to my request, cutting a check in less than 60 hours from my first correspondence with him. I wish to extend my sincere thanks to both Jim and Microsoft. Finally, today is my daughter's sixth birthday who shares the same age as DiSC. Shideh has stopped by my desk countless evenings to marvel about the icons and pdf files of DiSC'04. Her kind invitations to many fun tea parties have kept me entertained while working on DiSC'04. Both the editorial board and I hope DiSC'04 is a timely reference material for your research activities.
Shahram Ghandeharizadeh,  ©2004 Association for Computing Machinery |
