DBRank'07

Welcome to DBRank 2007

The First International Workshop on Ranking in Databases (DBRank'07) focuses on the semantics, the modeling and the implementation of ranking and ordering in database systems and applications. In recent years, there has been a great deal of interest in developing effective techniques for ad-hoc search and retrieval in relational databases, document and multimedia databases, scientific information systems, and so on. In particular, a large number of emerging applications require exploratory querying on such databases; examples include users wishing to search databases and catalogs of products such as homes, cars, cameras, restaurants, and photographs. To address the limitations of the traditional Boolean retrieval model in these emerging ad-hoc search and retrieval applications, Top-k queries and ranking query results are gaining increasing importance. In fact, in many of these applications, ranking is an integral part of the semantics, e.g., keyword search, similarity search in multimedia as well as document databases. The increasing importance of ranking is directly derived from the explosion in the volume of data handled by current applications. The sheer amount of data makes it almost impossible to process queries in the traditional compute-then-sort approach. Hence, ranking comes as a great tool for soliciting user preferences and data exploration.

DBRank aims at providing more insight into supporting ranking in database systems and will be an interesting addition to ICDE 2007; the workshop will be a great venue for the many research groups working on ranking worldwide, with a unique opportunity to share their experience in supporting ranking in various database systems, from relational to semi-structures and unstructured data; and on different levels from query formulation and preference modeling to query processing and optimization frameworks. The workshop covers (and is not limited to) the following topics:

• Ranking relational data
• Rank-aware query processing and optimization
• New fundamental developments in top-k algorithms
• Cost-models for top-k algorithms and operators
• User preference specification and query languages
• Ranking in Web and XML databases
• Supporting Information Retrieval queries in database systems
• Learning user preferences and ranking functions
• Ranking in distributed and peer-to-peer databases
• Ranking as a data exploration tool
• Ranking queries in data streams and continuous monitoring systems
• Applications of ranking and Top-k retrieval from databases

Submission

We welcome original, unpublished manuscripts for 8-pages papers inclusive of all references and figures. Papers should report completed results. Vision papers and descriptions of work-in-progress are also welcomed as short paper submissions (4 pages). Papers must be written in English, and formatted according to ICDE proceeding format. Electronic version of the workshop proceedings will be published by IEEE.

Paper Submission Site

Organization

Program Co-Chairs

• Gautam Das
  Computer Science and Engineering Department
  University of Texas at Arlington
  Arlington, Texas, USA
  gdas@cse.uta.edu
  
  
• Ihab F. Ilyas
  David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
  University of Waterloo
  Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
  ilyas@cs.uwaterloo.ca

Program Committee

• Sihem Amer Yahia - Yahoo Research, USA
• Walid Aref - Purdue University, USA
• Kaushik Chakrabarti - Microsoft Research, USA
• Kevin Chang - University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, USA
• Jan Chomicki - University of Buffalo, USA
• Amr EL Abbadi - University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
• Leonidas Fegaras - University of Texas at Arlington
• Dimitrios Gunopulos - University of California, Riverside, USA
• Vagelis Hristidis - Florida International University, USA
• Panos Ipeirotis - New York University, USA
• Werner Kießling - University of Augsburg, Germany
• Arnd Christian König - Microsoft Research, USA
• Nick Koudas - University of Toronto, Canada
• Nikos Mamoulis - University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
• Heikki Mannila - HIIT, Helsinki University of Technology, Finland
• Amelie Marian - Rutgers University, USA
• Dimitris Papadias - HKUST, Hong Kong
• Jian Pei - Simon Fraser University, Canada
• Neoklis Polyzotis - University of California, Santa Cruz, USA

Keynotes

• Dr. Surajit Chaudhuri
  Microsoft Research
  
  Title: Search over Databases
  
  Abstract: The talk will review semantics and efficiency issues in supporting keyword search and ranking over databases and critically examine our past research. We will mention important issues that require more attention in future research, e.g., (a) role of applications/business objects (b) Architectural considerations - separation of functionality in database server vs. middleware.

• Prof. Gerhard Weikum
  Max-Planck Institute for Informatics
  
  Title: What's Cool And What's Uncool About TA?
  
  Abstract: The family of Threshold Algorithms, TA for short, has become a very popular method for top-k query processing and ranked retrieval of unstructured, semistructured, and structured data. TA has many elegant properties and is extremely versatile, but it also has specific limitations and is competing with alternative methods for top-k queries. This talk reviews the advantages and disadvantages of TA and its many extensions, putting them in perspective against algorithmic alternatives and pointing out unsolved technical issues and research opportunities.

Important Dates

Paper Submission
December 5, 2006

Author Notification
January 5, 2007

Camera-Ready Version
January 15, 2007

News

8/11/06: Deadlines extended

8/11/06: Submission site open

8/1/07 : Accepted papers posted

24/3/07: Program posted