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International Journal of Computer Processing of
Oriental Languages, Vol. 14, No. 3 (2001) 211
© Chinese
Language Computer Society & World Scientific Publishing Company
Since the opening up of the Chinese market, the Chinese economy is growing
rapidly and has shown no sign of diminishing. However, the economic boom has not
been paralleled by the advancement in computing technology. This will eventually
hinders China's future development if it goes unremedied. Database is one of the
most important application in computing. At present, there is hardly any
database management system (DBMS) indigenous to China. This has a serious impact
on the Chinese computer industry since many database applications are now
developed using existing DBMSs which are manufactured by overseas computer
vendors (mostly by U.S. companies). Due to this, the application builders must
pay royalties to the DBMS manufacturers for any profit that they make. This is a
burden to them and should be removed. Moreover, there are some "Chinese-ised"
DBMSs in the market that are implemented by coupling a Chinese interface to an
English DBMS (e.g. Oracle). The overheads incurred due to the translation
between Chinese and English during database access can affect the database
performance. 
This special issue
is dedicated to the reporting of active database research projects in Mainland
China. The four papers in this issue were carefully selected among eight
submissions from different Chinese database research groups. The first paper
introduces the work at Renmin University in NChiql, a novice database natural
query language system. The NChiql parser adopts Dependency Grammar and the
underlying schema for query interpretation. This is followed by the description
of the research result of the Chinese University of Hong Kong,
i.e. Multi-Agent Workflow Model (MAWM), which was designed for modeling
Chinese business processes. In the third paper, a virtual enterprise integrated
information system, designed by Northeastern University, is outlined. Finally,
the fourth paper describes Sichuan University's research in the application of
natural language processing techniques to WWW information filtering. We are indebted to
many people for the compilation of this special issue. We would like to thank
Prof. Wang Shan, Renmin University, for her continuous and endless advice;
members of the Chinese Database interest group of the Chinese Computer
Federation (CCF DBS) for helping us to gather the latest research data on the
topic; Ms Kim Tan of World Scientific Publishing, for her help in preparing the
final manuscripts; and all the anonymous reviewers for reviewing the papers.