DBRank 2013 - 7th International Workshop on Ranking in Databases

In recent years, there has been a great deal of interest in developing effective techniques for ad-hoc search and ranked retrieval in relational databases, XML, RDF and graph databases, text and multimedia databases, scientific information systems, social networks, and many more. In particular, a large number of emerging applications require an explorative form of querying on such general-purpose or domain-specific databases; examples include users wishing to search bibliographic databases or catalogues of products, such as homes, cars, cameras, restaurants, photographs, etc. Current database query languages, such as SQL, XQuery or SPARQL, are designed for expert users and follow a Boolean retrieval model, which is inadequate for exploratory users who cannot articulate their perfect query needs.
Top-k queries and ranking query results are gaining increasing importance to address the needs of exploratory users. In fact, in many of these applications, ranking is an integral part of the semantics, e.g., for keyword search, similarity search in multimedia as well as document collections. The increasing importance of ranking is directly derived from the explosion in the volume of data that is handled by current applications. Without ranking, users would frequently be overwhelmed by too many results. Furthermore, the sheer amount of data makes it almost impossible to process queries in a 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 2013, which will be held in conjunction with VLDB 2013, serves as a platform for the discussion of challenges, research, and applications in the context of ranking for relational, XML, RDF, text, multimedia, multidimensional, and social data.