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332 The present’s futureFIGURE 29.6PCA based on means.By the 1990s, COPSS Presidential Addresses referred to the upcoming informationand technological revolution, its waves already heading for the unwary;see, e.g., Kettenring (1997) and Billard (1995, 1997).However, the real advances will take quite different formats to those predictedin the 1990s. In a very prescient comment, Schweizer (1984) declaredthat “distributions are the numbers of the future.” The present is that future.Furthermore, today’s future consists of a new paradigm whereby new methodologies,and new theories to support those methodologies, must be developedif we are to remain viable players as data analysts. These new methods mustalso be such that the classical models of the still-present and past come outcorrectly as special cases of the new approaches.In this chapter, one such approach, viz., symbolic data, has been describedalbeit ever so briefly. While a study of the literature may at first suggest thereare many symbolic techniques currently available, in reality there are very fewand even then those few handle relatively narrowly defined situations.There are two major directions for future work: one is to develop the newmethodologies for new data structures and to extend the plethora of situationsthat a century or more of research in so-called classical statistics produced,while the other is to establish mathematical underpinning to support thosenew methods (somewhat akin to the theoretical foundations provided initiallyby Bickel and Freedman (1981), and Singh (1981), which validated the earlybootstrap work). One certainty is sure — the present-future demands that weengage our energies in addressing the myriad of issues surrounding large andcomplex data sets. It is an exciting time to be a part of this undertaking.