Driven by the continued advances in hardware technologies, by the diffusion of the Internet, and by the increasing complexity of software systems, the areas of database management and programming languages and environments are faced with abundant research challenges. Today's software systems manage large amounts of traditional and non-traditional data, including temporal, spatial, spatio-temporal, dimensional, multimedia, and semi-structured data. The research objective is to develop technologies that meet programming and data management needs posed by software systems in general and by data-intensive applications, in particular.

The areas covered include general-purpose programming languages with an emphasis on languages in the object-oriented paradigm. Also covered are special-purpose languages, such as languages for management of different types of data. Also included are environments and tools that support the design, implementation, documentation, versioning, and configuration management in software development.

In the area of databases, the research relates to business intelligence, including data warehousing and on-line analytical processing, and to database integrity. In addition, it relates to temporal, spatial, spatio-temporal, and mobile databases, including conceptual modeling and database design, data models, query processing, indexing, and applications.

World-wide web related research covers semi-structured data management, Web application development, database search engines, and the use of functional languages for Web authoring and server-side programming.

The research approach has a technological focus and is primarily constructive in its outset, but also integrates experimental and analytical elements. Constructive activities include the design of concepts and frameworks, as well as the design and implementation of algorithms, data structures, languages, and systems. Experimental activities cover the testing of constructed artifacts, including both prototype-based experiments and simulation-based performance studies. Analytical activities include complexity analysis and language evaluation. The emphasis is on the development of theoretically sound results that solve actual real-world problems in the medium term and, in some cases, longer term.