Letter from the Editor - in - Chief Organizational Changes

The Bulletin of the Technical Committee on Data Engineering is published quarterly and is distributed to all TC members. Its scope includes the design, implementation, modelling, theory and application of database systems and their technology. Letters, conference information, and news should be sent to the Editor-in-Chief. Papers for each issue are solicited by and should be sent to the Associate Editor responsible for the issue. Opinions expressed in contributions are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the positions of the TC on Data Engineering, the IEEE Computer Society , or the authors' organizations. Membership in the TC on Data Engineering is open to all current members of the IEEE Computer Society who are interested in database systems. This issue contains letters from the incoming and outgoing chairs of the two key organizations within the IEEE Computer Society that are involved in the database area. I urge you to read these letters. The organizations are: • the Technical Committee on Data Engineering (TCDE), which is the sponsoring organization for both this publication (the Bulletin) and for the International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE). The outgoing chair is Erich Neuhold of the University of Vienna, the incoming chair is Paul Larson of Microsoft. I'd like to thank Erich for the enormous role that he has played in chairing so successfully both of these organizations, and to wish the new chairs, Paul and Calton, all the best in their ongoing efforts to build on the foundation that Erich as provided. The current issue of the Bulletin is on the topic of multilingual support within information systems. This is a topic that is important now and will only continue to grow in importance over time. The world is now " flat " as Thomas Friedman reminds us in his book. This means there are users and developers of information systems all over the world. Further there is clearly source material in a very wide variety of languages. Accessing this source material via a database or over the web is of increasing importance as people throughout the world expect to be able to find virtually everything ever written anywhere. What makes this topic an interesting technical area, even a research area, is how extraordinarily difficult it is to deal with the entire gamut of languages. Many languages and language families have idiosyncracies that make things complicated. Simple alphabets are all too frequently …