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We are in an information era where generating and storing large amounts of data are commonplace. A growing number of organizations routinely handle terabytes and exabytes of data, and individual digital data collections easily reach multiple gigabytes. Along with the increases in volume, the modality of digitized data that requires efficient management and the access modes to these data have become more varied. It is increasingly common for business and personal data collections to include images, video, voice, and unstructured text; the retrieval of these data comprises various forms, including structured queries, keyword search, and visual access. Data have become a highly valued asset for governments, industries and individuals, and the management of these data collections remains a critical technical challenge.

Database technology has matured over the past four decades and is now quite ubiquitous in many applications that deal with more traditional business data. The challenges of expanding data management to include other data modalities while maintaining the fundamental tenets of database management (data independence, data integrity, data consistency, etc.) are issues that the community continues to work on. The lines between database management and other fields such as information retrieval, multimedia retrieval, and data visualization are increasingly blurred.