... strings. Today these systems provide the infrastructure for much of our society, allowing fast, reliable, secure, and automatic access to data distributed throughout the world. Increasingly these systems automatically design and manage access to the data. The next steps are to automate access to richer forms of data: images, sound, video, maps, and other media. A second major challenge is automatically summarizing and abstracting data in anticipation of user requests. These multi-media databases and tools to access them will be a cornerstone of our move to Cyberspace. 1. Introduction And Overview Figure 1: The six generations of data management, evolving from manual methods, through several stages of automated data management. Computers can now store all forms of information: records, documents, images, sound recordings, videos, scientific data, and many new data formats. We have made great strides in capturing, storing, managing, analyzing, and visualizing this data. These tasks are generically called data management. ...

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