Japan and the largest very large Data Base conference yet

Abstract

"It is our great pleasure to welcome all of you to the Third International Conference on Very Large Data Bases. We hope that the conference will contr ibute to the learning process of data base communities by providing a forum for discussion and by the publication of papers addressing both theory and practice." So spoke Dr. Tosio Kitagawa, Fujitsu Ltd., president of the Information Processing Society of Japan and honorary chairman of the conference which got under way in Tokyo on October 6, sponsored by ACM and its SIGBDP, SIGIR and SIGMOD; IFIP; IEEE Computer Society and its Technical Committee on Data base Engineering; Society for Management Information Systems; Information Processing Society of Japan; Japan Special Research Project on Scientific Information Systems, and the Institute of Electronics and Communications Engineers of Japan. Why Tokyo? After holding the first VLDB conference in Framingham, Massachuset ts, and the second one in Brussels, Belgium, why select Japan for this year's conference? The answer is suggested in the opening remarks of Dr. Hermann Schmutz, IBM Heidelberg Scientific Center and the conference's European coordinator, who stimulated considerable European interest and participation in the conference: "The hosting country is well known in Europe for its advanced technological status," he said. "However, the traditionally close relationships between Japan and Europe in cultural and economical affairs have so far not been adequately matched by communication between computer experts from the two geographical areas. The third VLDB conference is used as an excellent opportunity to reduce this communication gap." By way of background (data from Japan Information Processing Development Center's Computer White Paper, 1976 Edition, Tokyo, Japan): • Japan is the only country in the world, outside the United States, where domestic computer manufacturers have a majority share of the computer market: 63.6 percent on an installed computer basis and 56.9 percent in terms of value, as of the end of March 1976. • Total number of domestic and foreign general-purpose computers in operation in Japan as of September 1975 was 32,447 (up 20.9 percent over the year earlier). By the end of March 1976, the number had grown to 35,305. The breakdown by machine size as of March 1976 was: