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Information and communication infrastructures underwent a rapid and extreme decentralization process over the past decade: From a world of statically and partially connected central servers rose an intricate web of millions of information sources loosely connecting one to another. Today, we expect to witness the extension of this revolution with the wide adoption of meta-data standards like RDF or OWL underpinning the creation of a semantic web. Again, we hope for global properties to emerge from a multiplicity of pair-wise, local interactions, resulting eventually in a self-stabilizing semantic infrastructure. This paper represents an effort to summarize the conditions under which this revolution would take place as well as an attempt to underline its main properties, limitations and possible applications. The work presented in this paper reflects the current status of a collaborative effort initiated by the IFIP 2.6 Working Group on Data Semantics.

We develop a framework of characteristics, essential and recommended, that a data model should have to be suitable as canonical model for federated databases. This framework is based on the two factors of the representation ability of a model: ezpressiveness and semantic relativism.Several data models are analyzed with respect to the characteristics of the framework, to evaluate their adequacy as canonical models.

Abstract. The words On-Line Analytical Processing bring together a set of tools, that use multidimensional modeling in the management of information to improve the decision making process. Lately, a lot of work has been devoted to modeling the multidimensional space. The aim of this paper is twofold. On one hand, it compiles and classifies some of that work, with regard to the design phase they are used in. On the other hand, it allows to compare the different terminology used by each author, by placing all the terms in a common framework.

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