Database management is attracting wide interest in bothacademic and industrial contexts. New application areas suchas CAD/CAM, geographic information systems, and multimediaare emerging. The needs of these application areas are farmore complex than those of conventional businessapplications. The purpose of this book is to bring togethera set of current research issues that addresses a broadspectrum of topics related to database systems andapplications. The book is divided into four parts:- object-oriented databases,- temporal/historical database systems,- query processing in database systems,- heterogeneity, interoperability, open systemarchitectures, multimedia database systems.