The challenge for the future lies in the management of the rapidly growing number of new data coming from CCD photometry and extensive observations of faint stars in nearby clusters and covering a wide range of groundbased and space techniques.
Due to the increasing quantity of available data, any study will become more and more time-consuming. One has therefore to think to more automated methods that rely not only on extensive data collections, but also on the transfer of knowledge to the computer, to let it do much of the work. Therefore, aside from continuing to collect and install new data and take other data types into consideration, the main development should consist of implementing more analysis facilities and calibrations.
Another important point would be to include in the database the knowledge contained not only in the data or procedures themselves, but in the article and review texts. Some could of course be recovered by searching the bibliography, but it may take a long time because the number of papers written every year on open clusters is increasing regularly and reaches the level of 200 papers for the best years. Therefore new results or exciting hypothesis should be extracted from the papers and stored in the database. This is actually possible thanks to the hypertext facility offered by NCSA Mosaic or the WAIS text indexing and search facilities.