Submissions must be postmarked by the deadline. In the summer of 1997, the Mars Pathfinder sent home more than 3 billion bytes of raw, machine-readable data. Scientists needed to gather, store, and manipulate the data before it could be interpreted. Using computer databases was the only way to deal with all of that information.
Computer databases have the ability to store huge collections of scientific, machine-readable data.
Try to think of a database as a plugged-in file cabinet. Not a day goes by without a scientist consulting some form of computerized file cabinet to research and analyze megatons of facts. It figures that databases naturally differ in subject matter. Databases certainly can differ in content, the amount of data, how the data are arranged in categories, and how the information is searched. But they shouldn't have a stray subject slipped in another category's field.