Report on the EDBT'02 panel on scientific data integration

As scientific research becomes an increasingly larger portion of corporate expenditures, pressure is mounting to make the processes more efficient. Data acquisition, access, management, analysis and the sharing of all available resources will be at the core of the transformations needed to achieve the next level of efficiency in research organizations. However current data management technology is geared toward business data and several technical challenges remain to make it suitable for scientific data. A panel entitled Scientific Data Integration was held on March 25 ~h, 2002, at the 8 th Conference on Extending Database Technology (EDBT) in Prague, in the Czech Republic. The panel focused on the issues needed to be addressed to enable scientific data integration and discussed solutions. Omar Boucelma, Universit~ de Provence, and Zod Lacroix, Arizona State University, moderated the panel which included Silvana Castano, Universit~ di Milano, Carole Goble, University of Manchester, and Bertram LudRscher, San Diego Supercomputer Center.