Prospectus of DBSJ

There are three academic societies engaging in activities on databases in Japan, the first is IPSJ Special Interest Group on Database Systems（SIGDBS for short），the second is IEICE Special Interest Group on Data Engineering（SIGDE for short），and the third is ACM SIGMOD Japan Chapter (SIGMOD-J for short）． SIGDBS，SIGDE and SIGMOD-J cooperate with each others and mainly conduct the following academic activities. SIGDBS and SIGDE co-organize "Summer Database Workshop" in the every summer; SIGDBS organizes "DBWeb" symposium in the end of every year; "DEWS" is organized by SIGDE in every spring; and many researchers participate in the academic meetings arranged by SIGMOD-J． Besides, "IPSJ Transactions on Databases (TOD)" has been copublished by DBS and IPSJ Special Interest Group on Fundamental Informatics (SIGFI) for 4 years. Moreover, "Media Informatics: Databases" has also become one of the research topics of Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research since 2003. The academic activities on databases of our country has been developing rapidly in recent years. On the other hand, it is difficult to construct information systems without considering databases in industries. Recently, database applications such as data mining becomes necessary for industrial actitivities.

　However, there was not such a society that represented the highly promising database activities in our country till now. Therefore, database communities lacked in the visibility of their great influence on information science and engineering fields, and there were also such problems that we did not have direct means that could connect the results of the academic activities of our country.

　Under this background, we established the Database Society of Japan（DBSJ）．However, the establishment of DBSJ should not interfere with the exsiting database societies. Therefore, the establishment of DBSJ should reinforce the actitivies of SIGDBS, SIGDE and SIGMOD-J. In order to achieve this purpose，DBSJ gathers and cooperates academic activities of the three exsiting database societies and operates its own independent activities such as publishing the DBSJ Journal. DBSJ is acting as a virtual E-society in a cyber space as shown in Figure 1.


Figure 1　DBSJ servers as a virtual E-society

Chief organizer, Establishment Committee of DBSJ：Yoshifumi Masunaga（Ochanomizu University）

Other organizers：Hiroshi Ishikawa（Shizuoka University），Yahiko Kambayashi（Kyoto University），Hiroyuki Kitagawa（Tsukuba University）， Masaru Kitsuregawa（University of Tokyo） ，Yasushi Kiyoki（Kieo University），Katsumi Tanaka（Kyoto University），Shojiro Nishio（Osaka University）， Akifumi Makinouchi（Kyushu University），Kazumasa Yokota（Okayama Prefectural University）， Haruo Yokota（Tokyo Institute of Technology），Masatoshi Yoshikawa（Kyoto University）