Information Retrieval and Databases: Synergies and Syntheses

Supported by the
National Science Foundation

September 14-16, 2003, Seattle, Washington

Workshop Organizers

Overview

Welcome to the NSF Information and Data Management (IDM) Workshop website. This is the sixth year of the IDM workshop. This year's workshop program will be held from September 14-16 at the Renaissance Madison Hotel in Seattle, Washington. The program features invited presentations, live demonstrations of current work, presentations and discussions of current work, and group brainstorming sessions focused on emerging research areas.

This year's workshop will cover a range of topics relating to information and data management including: model management, medical informatics, trust, privacy and security, personal information management, information integration, and context-based information access.

An overriding theme for this year's workshop is "Information Retrieval and Databases: Synergies and Syntheses". At a high level, the key difference between database technology and information retrieval is a distinction between structured data and unstructured data. As a result, several systemic differences have arisen over the years: Databases incorporate languages for expressing and verifying constraints so that exact answers to precise questions can be provided. Information retrieval systems require no explicit structure and provide approximate answers to queries based on keywords, features, subsequences, etc. The focus of this workshop is to find common ground across what has been dubbed the "structure chasm".

The goal of this workshop is to bring together the PIs and Co-PIs currently funded by the Information and Data Management Program (IDM and the new ITR) of the National Science Foundation to:

1. Cooperatively analyze research and development issues that are fundamental in making progress in this field.

Specify areas where major breakthroughs appear possible.

Identify needed collaborations (e.g., inter-disciplinary, academic-industry).

Specify facilities that are needed to support these identified research initiatives and collaborations.

2. Demonstrate current research results and interact with other researchers to assess the objectives, contributions and challenges of research activities funded by IDM.

3. Explore fruitful collaboration and synergism.

This workshop is supported by the National Science Foundation, Information and Data Management Program under the grant 0334623 (PIs: Harry Bruce, Alon Halevy, William Jones, Wanda Pratt, Linda Shapiro, and Dan Suciu, University of Washington). All opinions, findings, conclusions and recommendations in any material resulting from this workshop are those of the workshop participants and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.