Containing the proceedings of an international conference on database systems, held in Melbourne in 1997, this volume focuses on advanced database technologies and their applications. The 55 papers cover the emerging areas of the Internet, multimedia, and document database systems.

A field full of haystacks - dealing with heterogeneity in information access, W.B. Croft; trends in transaction processing, C. Mohan; a cost model for parallel navigational access in complex object DBMS, M. Gesmann; classifying network architectures for locating information sources, R. Dolin et al; supporting object migration in distributed systems, G. Semeczko and S.Y.W. Su; a graph-theoretic model for optimizing large join queries, C. Lee and C.-S. Shih; an indexing scheme for structured documents and its implementation, T. Dao et al; use of a persistent graph abstract data type for representing CASE tools repositories, R.M. Colomb; a general incremental technique for discovered association rules, D.W. Cheung et al; performance in practice of string hashing functions, M.V. Ramakrishna and J. Zobel; an integration methodology for autonomous taxonomy databases using priorities, H. Kitakami et al; language constructs for reliable distributed real-time transactions, Y. Yoon and J. Cho. (Part contents).