Commercial banking model confirms its economic reliability, in terms of contribution to systemic stability, and ensures an healthy flow of loans and savings. Also for small and medium enterprises, innovation and internationalization trends are closely associated with banks regional network

The VLDB Endowment is a non-profit foundation whose objective is to promote scientific and educational activities in the area of large-scale data, information, and knowledge management. The Endowment serves as the steering committee for the VLDB conference series. The Endowment also sponsors various scholarly activities. It has established a program that supports summer schools, tutorials, and other training activities of this kind, in countries that could otherwise not afford the expenses for such events. The Endowment is also the main sponsor of the biennial Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR), and it runs the VLDB Journal, one of the most successful journals in the database area. On various activities, the Endowment closely cooperates with ACM SIGMOD. The VLDB Endowment has a board of 21 elected trustees, who are the legal guardians of the Endowments charter and activities. Trustees are elected for a six-year period; the election procedure is document in the code of regulations available on the Endowments Web site. The board is continuously renewed, with one third of its members being replaced every two years. The trustees are elected among internationally distinguished researchers and professionals in the field of database and information systems who have contributed to the objectives of the Endowment with dedication and distinction. All trustees provide voluntary service.

Analysis and design of office information systems require the development of conceptual models for representing the different aspects of office work in an integrated way, independently of implementation details. This paper discusses the requirements for office conceptual models, showing their main distinguishing features with respect to conventional information systems models. On the basis of these requirements, the design criteria and the main features of the Semantic Office System model (SOS) are illustrated. Modeling of static, dynamic and evolutive aspects of the office work in SOS is discussed.

Automation of office work constitutes a new growing appl ication of information systems. The original characteri stics of an Office Information System (OIS) in comparison with a conventional information system imply the need for devel opi ng new design methodol ogies and model s, which are cl assified and discussed in this paper. OIS are not just document management systems (or word processing systems), 1.e., they do not consider only, or mainly, static aspects of data: they are in fact more general information systems where documents are only one of the many elements of the system. In addition, while conventional IS are often applied to support operational activities, office work shows many different facets, and therefore it is not reduci bl e to a set of operatl onal activities. Correspondi ngly, whil e the main phases that are commonly recognized in the design of a conventional IS (such as requi rements analysis, requi rements specification, logical design, optimization and implementation, system eval uatl on and . modification) can be transferred al so to OIS design, the , conceptual models for requirements specifications, on which the early design phases are based, should instead be changed in order to allow the specification of particular aspects of an OIS. Such aspects include new functionalities, such as filtering of data, reminding of activities to be performed, scheduling of manual and automatic activities, and communication; some specific types of data are also needed in an OIS: groups of data (documents and dossiers), unstructured and incomplete data, sophisticated handling of time, and of compl ex situations, distributed data, office workers roles. Other particular aspects are related to the fact that an office system is intrisically evol uti onary, and with the usage of the system: highly interactive, integrating different functions, requiring great flexibility with possible interruptions of tasks and with a high number of exceptions arising during the work. *This paper is forthcoming in ACM Transactions on Office Information Sy stems.

Although the sophistication of the applications of data bases has advanced tremendously, the development of techniques to support data base design has not advanced comparably. The purpose of this paper is to review the current state-of-art and today’s research and development efforts in the area of methodologies, techniques and tools for logical design of data base applications. The presentation covers the various basic steps of the logical data base design cycle, and particularly: requirement formulation and analysis, view modeling, view integration and schema analysis and mapping.