Workshops

VLDB conferences have become a celebrity seat for co-located workshops on topics related to data management. Continuing this tradition, VLDB 2009 features a set of co-located workshops:

PhD workshop

The VLDB PhD workshop is a forum for PhD students working in the broad areas addressed by the VLDB conference itself. This forum aims at facilitating interactions among PhD students and at stimulating feedback from more experienced researchers.

Date : August 24, 2009
Website: http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~amelie/VLDB09PhDWorkshop/
Normalized program: http://vldb2009.org/?q=node/31

RED (REsource Discovery)

The Second International Workshop on Resource Discovery aims at bringing together researchers, developers, and practitioners to discuss research issues and experience in developing and deploying concepts, applications, and solutions addressing various issues related to resource discovery. Papers presenting either theoretical or applicative material are expected. Because of the dynamic research and development effort towards supporting resource discovery for the life sciences, we expect to receive many contributions in the scope of this very exciting application domain. However, we encourage the submission of generic solutions or the presentation of application experiences other than related to life sciences.

Date : August 28, 2009
Website: http://bioinformatics.eas.asu.edu/RED/red2009.html
Normalized program: http://vldb2009.org/?q=node/33

XSym (XML Database Symposium)

The XML Database Symposium (XSym) series focuses on the convergence of database technology with XML technology, and brings together academics, practitioners, users and vendors to discuss the use and synergy between these technologies.

Date : August 24, 2009
Website: http://www.lirmm.fr/~bella/XSym/
Normalized program: http://vldb2009.org/?q=node/38

QDB (Quality in Databases)

Data and information quality has become an increasingly relevant topic for the database community: the ability to detect and correct errors in the data is critical to the functionality of a large number of applications, in areas ranging from business management to data-intensive science. While many of the associated technical issues have been investigated for quite some time, novel applications still pose original challenges, while advances in data management technology offer ideas for novel approaches. The QDB 2008 workshop focuses on practical methods for data quality assessment and data quality improvement.

Date : August 24, 2009
Website: http://qdb09.irisa.fr
Normalized program: http://vldb2009.org/?q=node/32

MUD (Management of Uncertain Data)

The aim of the workshop on Management of Uncertain Data is to provide a forum to share original ideas as well as research results and practical development experiences among researchers and application developers. In this workshop we want to explore the various aspects of uncertainty in data as well as techniques how to handle them in the domain of databases. In particular, we are interested in discussing the different kinds of uncertainty, different models for uncertainty representation in databases, techniques for querying and updating data involving uncertainty, and the various application areas in which handling uncertain data is involved.

Date : August 28, 2009
Website: http://mud.cs.utwente.nl

BIRTE (Enabling Real-Time Business Intelligence)

In today's competitive and highly dynamic environment, analyzing data to understand how the business is performing, to predict outcomes and trends, and to improve the effectiveness of business processes underlying business operations has become critical. The traditional approach to reporting is not longer adequate, users now demand easy-to-use intelligent platforms and applications capable of analyzing real-time business data to provide insight and actionable information at the right time. The end goal is to improve the enterprise performance by better and timelier decision making, enabled by the availability of up-to-date, high quality information.

As a response, the notion of "real-time enterprise" has emerged and is beginning to be recognized in the industry. Gartner defines it as "using up-to-date information, getting rid of delays, and using speed for competitive advantage is what the real-time enterprise is all about... Indeed, the goal of the real-time enterprise is to act on events as they happen".

Although there has been progress in this direction and many companies are introducing products towards making this vision reality, there is still a long way to go. In particular, the whole lifecycle of business intelligence requires new techniques and methodologies capable of dealing with the new requirements imposed by the real-time enterprise. From the capturing of real-time business performance data to the injection of actionable information back into business processes, all the stages of the Business Intelligence (BI) cycle call for new algorithms and paradigms as the basis of new functionalities including dynamic integration of real-time data feeds from operational sources, evolution of ETL transformations and analytical models, and dynamic generation of adaptive real-time dashboards, just to name a few.

The series of BIRTE workshops aims to provide a forum to discuss topics related to this emerging field and set research directions of business intelligence (BI) toward the vision of the real-time enterprise.

Date : August 24, 2009
Website: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/db/birte09
Normalized program: http://vldb2009.org/?q=node/34

DMSN (Data Management for Sensor Networks)

The workshop's scope includes all important aspects of sensor data management, including data acquisition, processing, and storage in remote wireless networks; the handling of uncertain sensor data; and the management of heterogeneous and sometimes sensitive sensor data in databases. The resource-constrained, lossy, noisy, distributed, and remote nature of wireless sensor networks implies that traditional database techniques often cannot be applied without significant retooling. Challenges associated with acquiring, processing, and archiving large-scale, heterogeneous sets of live sensor data also call for novel data management techniques. The inherently incomplete and noisy nature of sensor data further calls for techniques for data cleaning, inference, approximation. Finally, in many applications, the collecting of sensor data raises important privacy and security concerns that require new protection and anonymization techniques.

Date : August 24, 2009
Website: http://dmsn09.inf.ethz.ch/
Normalized program: http://vldb2009.org/?q=node/35

DBPL (Database Programming Languages)

Over the years DBPL has established itself as the main venue for publishing and discussing new ideas at the intersection of database and programming languages research. Many key contributions in query languages for object-oriented data, persistent databases, nested relational data, semistructured data, as well as fundamental ideas in types for query languages have been first announced and discussed at DBPL. Today's emergence of new data management applications like Web services, XML processing, sensor networks and peer to peer data management has lead to a new flurry of creativity in the area lying at the intersection of data management and programming languages, and DBPL is an established destination for such new ideas.

Date : August 24, 2009
Website: http://workshops.inf.ed.ac.uk/dbpl09/
Normalized program: http://vldb2009.org/?q=node/36

PersDB (Profile Management and Context Awareness)

Proliferation of database-driven web sites has brought upon a plethora of applications where different notions of user and context information are of paramount importance. Monitoring and trading stock portfolios, blog aggregation and news notification, dataset sharing, weather tracking, and even simple search are just a few examples of applications that can all be personalized based on users’ individual or social profiles and can be affected by their operational context, which may include the location, time, and other features of their environment. The trend towards more user-centric, personalized, and context-aware database systems requires new models and techniques able to provide users with the 'right information' at the 'right time' in the 'right place' and may affect database system functionality at several levels: designing the user interface, modeling users and context, enhancing and reformulating queries, content selection, content sharing, query routing and resource allocation in a distributed database federation, admission control, caching and scheduling, and managing the actual data and user profiles. Defining metrics and methods for measuring the system’s effectiveness from the user perspective is also very significant. The PersDB 2008 workshop aims at providing a forum for presentation of the latest research results, new technology developments, and new applications in the areas of personalized access, profile management, and context awareness in database systems.

Date : August 28, 2009
Website: http://persdb09.stanford.edu
Normalized program: http://vldb2009.org/?q=node/40

SDM (Secure Data Management)

Although cryptography and security techniques have been around for quite some time, emerging technologies such as ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence that exploit increasingly interconnected networks, mobility and personalization, put new requirements on security with respect to data management. As data is accessible anytime anywhere, according to these new concepts, it becomes much easier to get unauthorized data access. Furthermore, it becomes simpler to collect, store, and search personal information and endanger people's privacy. Therefore, research in the area of secure data management is of growing importance, attracting attention of both the data management and security research communities The interesting problems range from traditional ones such as, access control (with all variations, like dynamic, context-aware, role-based), database security (e.g. efficient database encryption schemes, search over encrypted data, etc.), privacy preserving data mining to controlled sharing of data.

The aim of the workshop is to bring together people from the security research community and data management research community in order to exchange ideas on the secure management of data. This year an additional special session will be organized with the focus on secure and private data management in healthcare. The workshop will provide forum for discussing practical experiences and theoretical research efforts that can help in solving the critical problems in secure data management. Authors from both academia and industry are invited to submit papers presenting novel research on the topics of interest.

Date : August 28, 2009
Website: http://www.hitech-projects.com/sdm-workshop/sdm09.html

USETIM (Using Search Engine Technology for Information Management)

For information management, databases offer precise, controlled access to data. But, they do not offer the easy-to-use search capabilities that most knowledge workers manipulate daily on sites such as Google. Access to information contained in databases is more difficult, and more restricted. One solution to this information bottleneck is to let search engines support the brunt of the work, by offloading information from the database into alternative infrastructures, such as that provided by search engine technology. Many business applications such as search, report generation and data analysis might be performed more efficiently on the replicated data without involving the native database technology, e.g. transactions. These offloaded databases, retaining some of their structure, can be recombined, mashed up, creating one-off, possibly disposable, databases, while the primary data is safe in the original database. This workshop will examine the limits and potentialities of use information retrieval and search engine technology for information management (IM) applications.

Date : August 24, 2009 - 8am-1pm
Website: http://vldb2009.org/?q=node/30
Normalized program: http://vldb2009.org/?q=node/37

TPC TC (TPC Technology Conference on Performance Evaluation and Benchmarking)

The Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) is a non-profit organization established in August 1988. Over two decades, it has shaped the landscape of modern transaction processing and database benchmarks. Now, the world is in the midst of an extraordinary information explosion. Enterprise data and user generated data levels to continue to grow exponentially. This has challenged researchers and industry experts to develop innovative techniques to evaluate and benchmark software and hardware technologies. As a result, the TPC is conducting a workshop in conjunction with VLDB09, and encourages researchers and industry experts to submit novel ideas and methodologies in performance evaluation, measurement, and characterization for 2010 an beyond. Authors are invited to submit original, unpublished papers that are not currently under review for any other conference or journal. We also encourage the submission of extended abstracts, position statement papers and lessons learned in practice. The accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings, and selected papers will be considered for future TPC benchmark developments.

Date : August 24, 2009
Website: http://www.tpc.org/tpctc2009
Normalized program: http://vldb2009.org/?q=node/41