DART '96 was held in conjunction with the Conference of Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) on Nov 15th in Baltimore. Its goal was to provide a forum for researchers and practitioners involved in integrating concepts and technologies from active and real-time databases to discuss the state of the art and chart a course of action. To this end, nine speakers from academia, industry, and research laboratories were invited to provide a perspective on the theory and practice underlying active real-time databases. In addition, some selected papers were presented briefly to complement the invited speakers' talks. The second half of the workshop was devoted to discussions aimed at identifying the problems that still need to be addressed in the contexts of the diverse target applications.