| Welcome to DBRank 2010The Fourth International Workshop on Ranking in Databases (DBRank 2010) 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 ICDE 2010; 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   SubmissionWe welcome original, unpublished manuscripts for 6-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 (3 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 Formatting Instructions 
 OrganizationProgram Co-Chairs
              Panagiotis G. IpeirotisDepartment of Information, Operations, and Management Sciences
 Stern School of Business
 New York University
 Program Committee
               Walid Aref, Purdue University, USA Nicolas Bruno, Microsoft Research, USA Kaushik Chakrabarti, Microsoft Research, USA Lei Chen, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong Jan Chomicki, University of Buffalo, USAAlfredo Cuzzocrea,  Italian National Research Council & University of Calabria, Italy Gautam Das, University of Texas at Arlington, USA Leonidas Fegaras, University of Texas at Arlington, USA Marios Hadjieleftheriou, AT&T, USA Vagelis Hristidis, Florida International University, USA Ihab Ilyas, University of Waterloo, CanadaAlpa Jain, Yahoo! Labs, USA Werner Kiessling, University of Augsburg, Germany Arnd Christian König, Microsoft Research, USA Nick Koudas, University of Toronto, Canada Chengkai Li, University of Texas at Arlington, USA Heikki Mannila, HIIT, Helsinki University of Technology, Finland Xiaofeng Meng, Renmin University of China, China Themis Palpanas, University of Trento, Italy Jian Pei, Simon Fraser University, Canada Neoklis Polyzotis, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA Kian-Lee Tan, National University of Singapore, Singapore Yufei Tao, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Martin Theobald, Stanford University, USA Xiaokui Xiao, Cornell University, USA Jun Yang, Duke University, USA Ke Yi, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong Man-Lung Yiu, Aalborg University, Denmark Shuigeng Zhou, Fudan University, USA Xiaofang Zhou, University of Queensland, Australia Steering Committee
              Gautam DasComputer Science and Engineering Department
 University of Texas at Arlington
 
              Vagelis HristidisSchool of Computing and Information Sciences
 Florida International University
 
 
Ihab F. IlyasDavid R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
 University of Waterloo
 
 KeynoteAlon Halevy (Google Research)   | Important Dates All deadlines are at 5:00pm Pacific Standard Time
  Paper Submission November 20, 2009
 
  Author Notification December 15, 2009
 
 
  Camera-Ready VersionJanuary 5, 2010
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