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The essential ingredient of this technology is the notion of 'deltas,' which are first-class values representing collections of proposed updates to a database. The Heraclitus framework provides a variety of algebraic operations for building up, combining, inspecting, and comparing deltas. Deltas can be directly applied to the database to yield a new state, or used 'hypothetically' in queries against the state that would arise if the delta were applied. The central point here is that the step of evaluating deltas to 'first-class' citizens in database programming languages will yield tremendous leverage on the problem of supporting updates in collaborative information processing. In short, the original intention was to develop the theoretical and practical foundation for a technology based on deltas in an object-oriented database context, develop a toolkit for active object-oriented databases, and apply this toward collaborative information processing.