Guest Editors’ Introduction

Abstract

This special issue contains extended versions of three contributions that have been selected as the best papers of the 4th International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Information Systems (PDIS’96), which was held in Miami Beach in December 1996. Parallel and distributed database technology is at the heart of many mission-critical applications such as online transaction processing, data warehousing, business workflow management, interoperable information systems, and information brokering in global networks. While commercial systems in this arena are gradually maturing, new challenges are posed by the growing demand for large-scale, enterprise-wide solutions and the proliferation of services on the information superhighway. Future parallel and distributed information systems will have to support millions of clients and will face tremendous scalability challenges with regard to massive data volume, performance, availability, and also administration and longterm maintenance.