The papers in these Proceedings were presented at the 5th Informatik-Symposium which was held in Bad Homburg, Germany, from September 24 - 26, 1975. The Symposium was organized by the Scientific Relations Department of IBM Germany and sponsored by IBM Germany and the IBM World Trade Corporation.
The aim of the Informatik-Symposium is to strengthen and improve the communication between universities and industry, by covering a subject in the field of computer science, both from a university and from an industry point of view.
During the last 5-10 years, Data Base Systems have developed from a highly speculative "Management Information System (MIS)" approach to a practical production tool. In the late 50fs and early 60's, the application program was viewed as the nucleus of an application, with multiple data sets as accessories to the application program, and multiple, more or less unrelated application programs serving the needs of a larger enterprise or organization. The modern approach views the data base as the nucleus of a data processing operation, surrounded by multiple application programs operating on its data.
This switch has significantly increased the need for features and characteristics, which permit quick adaptions to an ever changing set of external requirements. In the old approach, external changes usually could be contained to one or a few application programs and their associated data sets. Because of the tight coupling between application programs and their data in a Data Base System, external changes are much more pervasive than they used to be. As a consequence, practical Data Base System implementations require a degree of universality and generality unknown in previous data processing installations.
In organizing this Symposium, we structured the subject matter into four topics. The topic of data structures covers the logical view the user has on internally stored data. This topic is closely related to the subject of data base languages. In doing this, we specifically tried to avoid a repetition of the popular argumentation of the pros and cons of the various data representation models, e.g. the hierarchical, network, and relational models...