Declarative languages — Paradigm of the past or challenge of the future? -- A glimpse of paradise -- An object-oriented data model for artificial intelligence applications -- An overview of life -- On the semantics of rules in database programming languages -- Towards a categorical data model supporting structured objects and inheritance -- Typing schemes for objects with locality -- Object orientation and logic programming for databases: A season's flirt or long-term marriage? -- Semantics of object-oriented data models — The evolving algebra approach -- Extending the entity-relationship model for a high-level, theory-based database design -- Towards database application systems: Types, kinds and other open invitations -- Modelling inheritance in a strongly typed functional model -- Bulk types for large scale programming -- Controlled generation of intensional answers -- Data construction with recursive set expressions -- The LOGIDATA+ model and language -- A recursive base for database programming primitives -- Toward multiparadigm database interfaces -- Updating Datalog databases -- Synthesis: Towards a query facility for generalized information resources -- The database programming language Atlant: Principal features and implementation techniques -- LOQIS: The object-oriented database programming system -- The CLOS project: Towards an object-oriented environment for application development -- The HYTECH project: IP tools based on hypertext technology -- Visicom: A visual interface to databases -- The ADIS project on ADaptive information systems: Concepts and language technology -- Istspn: Integrated Software Tool Supporting Petri Nets -- The FOLI project: Towards an artificial intelligence language -- Informatization and restructuring of Soviet society.

Currently, the field of information systems technology is rapidly extending into several dimensions. There is the semantic dimension (including object orientation, data deduction and extended knowledge representation schemes), there is improved systems integration, and there are new tools. All these extensions aim to provide semantically richer and better engineered information systems that allow for more adequate and complete representations and thus extend the effective use of database technology to a wider class of applications. Database researchers and developers, whether they are committed to application or to system construction, are convinced that next-generation information system technology will be heavily determined by a handful of new concepts that they have to understand and work out in detail now. This volume concentrates on the following topics: - Extended data types and data models, database programming languages; - Rule-based data deduction, expert systems, knowledge bases; - Object orientation and semantic data modelling; - DB application development, methodologies and tools; - Interface technology, parallelism, interoperability, ...; - New database applications.