AIMS & TOPICS OF INTEREST:

Information search is an indispensable component of our lives. Web search engines are widely used for searching textual documents, images, and video. However, there are also vast collections of structured and semi-structured data both on the Web and in enterprises, such as relational databases, XML data, etc. Traditionally, to access these resources, a user must learn structured or semi-structured query languages, and must be able to access data schemas, which are most likely heterogeneous, complex, and fast-evolving. To relieve web and scientific users from the learning curve and enable them to easily access structured and semi-structured data, there is a growing research interest to support keyword search on these data sources. Indeed, the rich meta-information embedded in (semi-)structured data provides a great potential to enhance search quality compared to search on unstructured documents. However, due to the inherent ambiguity of keyword search and the possibly high complexity of the data, providing intelligent search results efficiently is extremely challenging.

The aim of this workshop is to encourage researchers from both academia and industry communities to discuss the opportunities and challenges in keyword search on (semi-)structured data, and to present the key issues and novel techniques in this area. We invite papers from researchers and practitioners working in relational databases, data warehouses, XML, information extraction, natural language processing, probabilistic databases, and related areas to submit their original papers to this workshop. The main topics include but are not limited to:

• Keyword search on relational databases and data warehouses
• Keyword search on XML data
• Keyword search on extracted data from text documents
• Keyword on other data structures (e.g. workflows, annotated images)
• Keyword search on data streams and continuous monitoring systems
• Ranking schemes
• Top-K query processing
• Result snippet generation
• Result clustering
• Query cleaning
• User preferences and feedback
• Handling data uncertainty in keyword search
• Search quality evaluation
• Performance optimization

IMPORTANT DATES

Abstract Submission: April 10, 2009 (midnight PST)
Paper Submission: April 17, 2009 (midnight PST)
Notification of Acceptance: May 15, 2009
Workshop Date: June 28, 2009

SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS

Regular research papers reporting original scientific results, as well as vision and work-in-progress papers that have the potential to stimulate debate on existing solutions or identify emerging challenges are encouraged.

We also welcome demonstration proposals and posters to foster interaction, to present system perspective on real problems, and to introduce innovative concepts.

Papers should be formatted according to the ACM guidelines and SIG proceedings templates, and submitted electronically in PDF format. A research paper should be 4-6 pages, and a demonstration proposal or poster should be 2 pages. Each paper will be reviewed by at least three members of the program committee.

Accepted papers, demonstration proposals and posters will be included in SIGMOD DiSC. This ensures wide dissemination and high visibility (e.g. in the ACM Digital Library and DBLP). Online proceedings will additionally be hosted at the workshop web site.

The extended version of the best papers from the workshop will be recommended to WWWJ.

Submission website: https://cmt.research.microsoft.com/KEYS2009