Brahim reported on his attendance to the VLDB'01 conference in Italy. He stressed that most papers deal with a very specific problem. Also, most papers seem to adhere to the same template, i.e., Problem Statement, Motivations (application), Algorithms, Experiments and Analysis. After an interesting discussion took place. The focus was on Web services:

• What they mean?
• What is their interest and impact?
• What research issues should be addressed?
• Waht are the main applications?