DBRank 2011 - Fifth International Workshop on Ranking in Databases (DBRank 2011)

The Fifth International Workshop on Ranking in Databases (DBRank 2011) 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 XML databases, text and multimedia databases, scientific information systems, biological databases, and so on. In particular, a large number of emerging applications require exploratory querying on such general-purpose or domain-specific databases; examples include users wishing to search bibliographic databases or catalogs of products such as homes, cars, cameras, restaurants, photographs, etc. 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 user would be overwhelmed by too many unranked results. Furthermore, 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. Ranking imposes several challenges for almost all data-centric systems.

DBRank aims at providing more insight into supporting ranking in database systems and will be an interesting addition to VLDB 2011; 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
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
Ranking multimedia data
Domain-specific ranking
Multidimensional data analysis using ranking tools
Personalized ranking functions
Learning user preferences and ranking functions
Ranking and information extraction