Several researchers claim that the web is just a big database and that extending database technology to the new environment will solve all problems.  Several other researchers claim that databases are just a special case of the web and that specializing web technology to the specific database environment will solve all problems.  In this talk, we will discuss some of the arguments used by the two camps and then examine how the two technologies stand up against several important technical questions.

Yannis Ioannidis is currently a Professor at the Department of Informatics of the University of Athens.  He received his Diploma degree in Electrical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, in 1982, the M.Sc. degree in Applied Mathematics (Computer Science) from Harvard University in 1983, and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1986.  He joined the faculty of the Computer Sciences Department of the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1986, where he became a Professor. His research interests include database and information systems, human-computer interaction, digital libraries, and scientific systems, topics on which he has published over 50 articles in leading journals and conferences and holds one patent.  Prof. Ioannidis was the recipient of the Presidential Young Investigator (PYI) award in 1991. He has been a principal investigator in over twenty research projects funded by various government agencies (USA, Europe, Greece) or private industry.

He is currently an Associate Editor of Information Systems, the VLDB Journal, ACM DiSC, and the International Journal of Intelligent Information Systems.  He has also served on the editorial board of IEEE Data Engineering for 1990-1993 and has been a member of the program committees of over forty conferences (SIGMOD, VLDB, PODS, ICDE, EDBT, KDD, etc.).  Finally, he has been the program committee chair of the 1997 Conference on Statistical and Scientific Database Management and the program committee co-chair of the 4th IFIP 2.6 Working Conference on Visual Database Systems in 1998. He also serves as a program chair for the "Information Systems Infrastructure" track of the 2002 VLDB Conference.

The last decade has seen significant changes in the hardware technology. Today, microprocessors run at the speed of GHz, and computer systems using multiples of such high-speed CPUs are quite common in the market. On the memory side, as the price of DRAM chips continues to drop, a few GB of memory is easily affordable in today's computer systems, and soon this affordable memory size will grow to a few tens of GB, and eventually is expected to reach a terabyte during the coming decade.

Despite the rapid changes in hardware, the changes in the data management software occur slowly, primarily because the commercial DBMS vendors are heavily invested in the disk-primary database architecture. While this disk-primary architecture can benefit from large memory as well using it as the buffer for the disk-resident data blocks, the performance gain is inherently limited by the indirect nature of data access and many disk-primary design decisions.

The Main-Memory DBMS assumes that the database resides primarily in memory. This memory-primary architecture, free from the overhead of mapping between memory and disk, has many advantages over the disk-primary architecture such as better focus on the utilization of CPU power and IO channel capacity, and the ease of tuning the system. This talk reviews the current state of main memory database research and shows why the memory-primary data management architecture wins the disk-primary one in many performance-hungry applications in telecom and Internet, often, by orders of magnitude.

Cha received his BS in EE and MS in Control and Instrumentation Engineering from Seoul National University in 1980 and 1982, respectively. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1991. For his Ph.D. thesis, Prof. Cha developed a knowledge-driven menu-guided pseudo-natural language query interface to database and proposed a semantic data model for the acquisition of knowledge for guiding the user's query composition. Since 1992, he has been on the faculty of engineering at Seoul National University, where he currently directs about fifteen Ph.D. and two-year master program students. Prof. Cha has experience of working at the Data Communications Corp. of Korea (DACOM), the Computer Science Center of Texas Instruments, Inc. in Dallas, Texas, IBM Palo Alto Scientific Center, and HP Laboratories. His current research focuses on the main memory DBMS architecture, implementation, and application to telecom, Internet, and spatial database domains. Prof. Cha, tired of chasing government funding, recently founded a company called Transact In Memory, for the research, development, and commercialization of a highly parallel transact in memory engine that he and his students have developed.

Electronic business will become the trademark of the 2000s. Today, enterprises view the Web presence as a logical extension of their existing business models in terms of business operations, distribution channels and marketing media. To compete successfully, enterprises are demanding effective ways to implement best-practices processes for electronic business on the Internet and beyond.  It requires a fundamental re-implementation of their operational systems. Many new technologies are emerging to support this need.

In this talk, I will review these technologies and their applications in various E-business domains. I will introduce both front-end and back-end systems and associated protocols. The main topics to be covered include:

• What are E-commerce, E-business, E-service and M-service?
• What operational system supports are required?
• XML and its e-business applications
• Workflow management and its e-business application.
• Emerging standards of B2B conversation protocols supporting marketplace operations.
• Data mining technology and its applications to e-business operations.

Ming-Chien Shan received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from University of California, Berkeley in 1980. Dr. Shan joined IBM DB2 team in 1978 working on query optimization and distributed DBMS. He then joined HP in 1985 and managed various research projects, including object-oriented DBMS, heterogeneous DBMS, distributed object-oriented system, workflow and telecom service provisioning. Currently, he is the manager of E-Business Solutions group at HP Research Laboratories. His group has engaged in many B2B, B2C and mobile e-business system development in the retail, finance, and telecom industrial sectors supporting supply chain management, order fulfillment and procurement.

Dr. Shan has served as chairperson or program committee members in many conferences. He will serve as the general chairs for VLDB TES. 2001 and ICDE RIDE-2EC'2002, and as a guest editor for VLDB Journal, 2001. Dr. Shan is a lecture professor at UC-Berkeley, California State  University, and Santa Clara University. He has published more than 50 research papers and been granted 15 software patents.

With the tremendous growth in the amount of digital multimedia information, it is becoming increasingly important to effectively store, search and retrieve such information.  Recent advances in multimedia databases have resulted in technologies for managing a variety of multimedia formats including images, video, audio, and text.  In addition, advances in content-based retrieval have resulted in new methods for querying multimedia databases according to the audio-visual features of the multimedia content.  In order to enable interoperable searching, indexing, filtering, and retrieval of multimedia, the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) is developing a new standard called the "Multimedia Content Description Interface," also known as MPEG-7.  The effort is being drivenby requirements taken from a large number of applications related to multimedia databases, interactive media services (music, TV programs), video libraries, and so forth.  MPEG-7 is achieving this goal by developing an XML-Schema based standard for describing features of multimedia content. In particular, MPEG-7 provides tools for describing multimedia content at the feature, syntactic, and semantic levels, and for describing models that bridge the gap between low-level features and high-level semantics.

MPEG-7 presents a number of significant technical challenges for multimedia databases.  Since MPEG-7 standardizes only the metadata structures themselves (Descriptors and Description Schemes) and the Description Definition Language (DDL), it is left open for industry competition and future innovation to produce technologies for extracting, searching, and filtering MPEG-7 descriptions.  For one, new query methods are needed for similarity matching with fuzzy constraints across the different levels of multimedia content description, including features, structure, and semantics.  In addition, specialized database index structures are needed for MPEG-7 Descriptors because of their high-dimensionality and specialized metrics.  New methods are also needed for automatically classifying multimedia content at the semantic level based on automatically extracted features.  In this tutorial, we study the problems of content-based retrieval from multimedia databases, review the emerging MPEG-7 standard, and examine the new challenges for supporting MPEG-7 in multimedia databases.

John R. Smith received his M. Phil and PhD. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University in 1994 and 1997, respectively.  He is currently Manager of the Pervasive Media Management Group at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center.  He is also Chair of the MPEG Multimedia Description Schemes (MDS) group and Technical Chair of MPEG-7 in NCITS. Dr. Smith's research interests include multimedia databases, content analysis, compression, indexing, and retrieval.  At Columbia, he developed the WebSEEk and VisualSEEk image and video search engines, where he received the Eliahu I. Jury award for outstanding achievement as a graduate student in the areas of systems communication or signal processing.  Dr. Smith is an Adjunct Professor at Columbia University and a member of IEEE.