1st Int. Workshop on Non-Conventional Data-Access (NoCoDA 2012)
In conjunction with ER 2012, Florence, Italy
15-18 October, 2012

Web site: http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/nocoda2012/

Aim and Scope

As more and more information becomes available to a growing multitude of people, the ways to access data are rapidly evolving as they must take into consideration, on one front, the kind of data available today and, on the other front, a new population of prospective users.

As an example of the first front, data is scattered among very diverse sources and need to be retrieved, transformed and merged to provide valuable information, while search queries on semi- or totally un-structured data impose novel modelling and access approaches.

On the second front, ranked solutions to keyword-based searches is emerging as the standard paradigm for querying data repositories, while recommendation applications tend even to anticipate user needs by automatically suggesting the information which is most appropriate to the preferences of the users and to the current situation. In addition, the availability of semantic information is increasingly exploited to better understand user intentions.

This need on two opposite fronts has already originated a steadily growing set of proposals of non-conventional ways to access data while inheriting, where possible, the formidable equipment of methods, techniques and methodologies that have been produced in the database field during the last forty years. These new proposals embrace the new challenges, suggesting fresh approaches to data access that rethink fundamentally the traditional information access methods in which SQL queries are posed against a known and rigid schema over a structured database.

This workshop welcomes contributions on the conceptual and semantic aspects of non-conventional methods for data access and on their practical application to modern data and knowledge management.

Topics of Interest

Addressing the above challenges requires understanding the conceptual and formal aspects of non-conventional data-access as well as the practical aspects of its application in real-world scenarios. Relevant topics of the proposed workshop include, but are not limited to, the following:

- Context-aware data access
- Preference queries
- Personalized data access
- Keyword-search over databases
- Provenance-aware data access
- Ontology-based data access
- Database summarization
- Query relaxation
- Approximate query-answering
- Probabilistic querying
- Schema-agnostic data access
- Query annotation
- Question answering
- Natural language querying
- Mobile and pervasive data access
- Query Mediators
- Push-based data delivery
- Privacy-preserving data access

Paper Submission

We invite submissions of technical research papers as well as speculative/visionary papers addressing one (or more) of the workshop topics. The page limit for workshop papers is 10 pages for full papers
and 6 pages for short, position, and vision papers. Papers should be formatted according to Springer LNCS style http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html. They need to be original and not submitted or accepted for publication in any other workshop, conference, or journal. Manuscripts not submitted in the LNCS style or having more than 10 pages will not be reviewed and thus automatically rejected. Papers should be submitted through EasyChair at: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=nocoda2012

Publication

Workshop proceedings will be published by Springer in the LNCS series as the official ER workshop proceedings. We are planning to organize a special issue at a high-quality journal on the field with invited extended versions of selected papers.

Important dates

- Paper submission: May 7, 2012
- Notifications sent: June 4, 2012
- Camera-ready papers: June, 11th 2012

Organizing Committee & Workshop Co-chairs

Giorgio Orsi (University of Oxford)
Letizia Tanca (Politecnico di Milano)
Riccardo Torlone (Universit? Roma Tre)

Local Organization

Marco Bertini (Universit? di Firenze)

Program Committee

- Leopoldo Bertossi (Carleton University, Canada)
- Francois Bry (Ludwig Maximilians Universit?t M?nchen, Germany)
- Andrea Cal? (Birkbeck University of London, UK)
- Diego Calvanese (Universit? di Bolzano, Italy)
- Paolo Ciaccia (Universit? di Bologna, Italy)
- George Fletcher (Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, The Netherlands)
- Georg Gottlob (University of Oxford, UK)
- Francesco Guerra (Universit? di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Italy)
- Georgia Koutrika (IBM Almaden, USA)
- Marco Manna (Universit? della Calabria, Italy)
- Ioana Manolescu (INRIA/LRI, France)
- Davide Martinenghi (Politecnico di Milano, Italy)
- Wilfred Ng (University of Hong Kong, PRC)
- Dan Olteanu (University of Oxford, UK)
- Jan Paredaens (University of Antwerp, Belgium)
- Andreas Pieris (University of Oxford, UK)
- Evaggelia Pitoura (University of Ioannina, Greece)
- Mike Rosner (University of Malta, Malta)
- Timos Sellis (Research Center "Athena" and NTUA, Greece)
- Stijn Vansummeren (Universit? Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium)
- Yannis Velegrakis (University of Trento, Italy)

Contacts

General enquiries: nocoda2012@easychair.org
Deadline and submissions: torlone@dia.uniroma3.it
Workshop organization: tanca@elet.polimi.it
Local arrangements: bertini@dsi.unifi.it
Website: giorgio.orsi@cs.ox.ac.uk