Internet telephony, electronic commerce, on-line information services,a nd video conferencing are projected to grow rapidly in coming years. How can we charge for these and similar services? What information must be gathered to enable proper billing for services rendered? Where is this information generated and where is it collected? These questions are being addressed in today's marketplace in an ad-hoc manner. Since this is in esence a distributed information system problem, the database research community should be able to have a positive influence on the evolution of billing systems for electronic communication and information services. Billing systems represent a significant and growing database problem. They offer an application domain for real-time databases, materialized views, event aggregation, data mining, OLAP, etc. The goal of this panel is to create awareness of this application domain and to inform conference attendees of the key issues and opportunities via a (vigorous, we hope) debate.
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