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ExploreDB: 2nd International Workshop on Exploratory Search in Databases and the Web
https://sites.google.com/site/exploredb2015/
May 31, 2015 - Melbourne, Australia

Co-located with SIGMOD/PODS 2015
http://www.sigmod2015.org/
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WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION
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Today, there is a need to develop novel paradigms for exploratory user-data interactions that emphasize user context and interactivity with the goal of facilitating exploration, interpretation, retrieval, and assimilation of information. A huge number of applications need an exploratory form of querying.
Ranked retrieval techniques for relational databases, XML, RDF and graph databases, text and multimedia databases, scientific and statistical databases, social networks and many others, is a first step towards this direction. Recently, several new aspects for exploratory search, such as preferences, diversity, novelty, surprise and serendipity, are gaining increasing importance. From a different perspective, recommendation applications tend to anticipate user needs by automatically suggesting the information, which is most appropriate to the users and their current context. Also, a new line of research in the area of exploratory search is fueled by the growth of online social interactions within social networks and Web communities. Many useful facts about entities (e.g., people, locations, organizations, products) and their relationships can be found in a multitude of semi-structured and structured data sources, such as Wikipedia, Linked Data cloud, Freebase, and many others. Therefore, novel discovery methods are required to provide highly expressive discovery capabilities over large amounts of entity-relationship data, which are yet intuitive for end-users.


TOPICS OF INTEREST
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The main topics covered by the workshop include, but are certainly not limited to:

- Exploratory analytics over large-scale datasets
- Interactive data analytics
- Personalizing data exploration
- Personal and historical data exploration
- Exploration and analysis of massive social networks
- Use of social networks for exploratory search
- Exploratory search in relational databases, Web, XML, RDF and graph databases, and multimedia databases
- Preferences, diversity, novelty, surprise and serendipity in exploratory search
- Exploratory search via recommendations
- Exploratory search via query reformulation, auto-completion and refinement, query relaxation and approximate query-answering, and faceted search
- Why and why not queries
- Location-aware exploratory search
- Result presentation for data exploration, e.g., summarization, clustering, snippet generation
- Intelligent browsing, navigation and visualization
- Interfaces for supporting user-generated content and social interaction
- Declarative languages for exploration
- Exploratory problem solving


IMPORTANT DATES
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Paper Submission Deadline: March 10, 2015
Acceptance Notification: April 10, 2015
Camera Ready: April 30, 2015
ExploreDB Workshop: May 31, 2015


SUBMISSION
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ExploreDB 2015 invites submissions of original research, practical experiences, evaluation results, or novel approaches and applications. Papers submitted should be at most six (6) pages long (including all references and figures). In addition, we welcome summaries of previous research relevant to the workshop as short paper submissions of up to three (3) pages long (including all references and figures). Papers of this kind outline work of the authors that has already been published in other venues, and highlight the relevant future directions. Finally, we accept position, outrageous-idea and vision papers of up to three (3) pages long (including all references and figures). Submissions should have their type mentioned within, as a title footnote (i.e., technical, summary or position paper).
Papers should be submitted electronically as PDF documents and be formatted using the ACM proceedings double-column format (see the ACM SIG Proceedings Templates).

Submissions will be accepted only through the submission site EasyChair at: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=exploredb2015

Please note that at least one of the authors of any accepted paper must be registered to the conference.


WORKSHOP CHAIRS
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Georgia Koutrika (HP Labs, Palo Alto, koutrika -at- hp.com)

Laks V.S Lakshmanan (Dept. of Computer Science, Univ. of British Columbia, laks -at- cs.ubc.ca)

Mirek Riedewald (College of Computer and Information Science, Northeastern University, mirek -at- ccs.neu.edu)

Kostas Stefanidis (Institute of Computer Science, FORTH, kstef -at- ics.forth.gr)


PROGRAM COMMITTEE
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Wolf-Tilo Balke, Institut für Informationssysteme, TU Braunschweig, Gernamy
K. Selcuk Candan, Arizona State University, USA
Nicola Ferro, University of Padova, Italy
Stratos Idreos, Harvard University, USA
H. V. Jagadish, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA
Haridimos Kondykakis, ICS-FORTH, Greece
Mohamed Mokbel, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA
Kjetil Nørvåg, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway
Aditya Parameswaran, University of Illinois, USA
Evaggelia Pitoura, University of Ioannina, Greece
Mohamed Sharaf, University of Queensland, Australia
Letizia Tanca, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
Panayiotis Tsaparas, University of Ioannina, Greece
Yannis Tzitzikas, University of Crete and ICS-FORTH, Greece
Gerhard Weikum, Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Germany
Demetris Zeinalipour, University of Cyprus, Cyprus