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The papers appearing in this special issue of the "IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering" periodical are based on papers that originally appeared in the proceedings of the First International Conference on Data Engineering which was held in Los Angeles, California, on April 25-27, 1984. The paper by Braegger, Dudler, Rebsamen and Zehnder was selected as the best paper at the conference by the awards committee, and concerns a database tool called Gambit. This design tool is based on an extended relational/entity relationship model and assists the designer with a wide variety of subtools. The paper by Farmer, King, and Myers is also about a design tool which is called the Semantic Database Constructor (Sedaco). It is based on a semantic data model which buffers the designer from most low level data structuring issues.