Expanding the Information and
Data Management (IDM)
Research and Education Community
October 2 (8:30am) - Oct. 4 (noon), 2000
Hotel Roanoke
Roanoke, VA
|
Links To Important Information:
Workshop Purpose
The purpose of this workshop is to bring together
IDM practitioners, algorithm specialists, and tool
developers to briefly summarize the state of the art in IDM
and to map out a support infrastructure for the larger
IDM research and educational community. Specifically, the workshop
will prepare recommendations to serve the IDM community through
online resources (e.g., IDM portal, digital library, Web site)
that
aid research, development, and education about IDM-related
fields.
Related Activities
Related activities have been adopted in many diverse
communities with encouraging results. For example, the Collected Algorithms,
GAMS and Netlib
facilities pioneered experimental
investigations in the field of mathematical software.
Repositories and testbeds at the community level have become accepted forums
for disseminating experimental results. Software libraries and support for
software testing are well developed in some research communities.
Other related work includes the
Protein Data Bank,
GenBank, and the
Quantum Chemistry Program Exchange.
IDM Issues Related to
Infrastructure
The workshop will seek to explore these issues in various key
areas of information and data management. Important issues include
modeling the experimental process of defining a population of
test problems, schema management, determining problem features
most relevant to algorithm analyses, data set modeling, experiment
management, and analyzing the applicability of algorithms and tools
in different situations.
Recommendations will be developed regarding mechanisms for building
and maintaining infrastructure, including sources and amount of funding
required. Discussion,
focused on information and data management,
will deal with issues such as: (a) test collections of
audio/video; (b) software collections;
(c) courseware collections; (d) linguistic/dictionary collections;
(e) needs for interoperability (e.g., query translation); (f) metrics;
(g) role of collaboratories; (h) technology for shared repositories;
and (i) an IDM Web site (a portal, that should be continuously
updated).
Thus, in case (b), we will consider what types of software
(experimental, demo, free, shareware, ...)
should be emphasized; and
what layers of services should support that software
(e.g., a recommender, a match-maker, a
collaboration facilitator).
Workshop Attendees and Program
Attendees:
30 or more attendees from the IDM community are expected
to attend, including PIs and co-PIs on IDM-supported
projects, both those who have developed algorithms/tools/data sets and those
interested in using such resources (for research and/or educational purposes).
If you are interested in participating, please send a position statement to
Prof. Edward A. Fox at fox@vt.edu. In
addition, partners will be invited from industry and other related domains.
Partners from industry are encouraged to recommend
ways that PIs could seek free/heavily discounted software,
collaboration, summer jobs for students, etc.
(as discussed at the
1998 Industry-Academia workshop).
Format:
The format of the workshop will include plenary talks by key people in
the field, and three breakout sessions, concentrating on:
- algorithms for manipulating, extracting schema from, and
querying Web data (XML, DTDs, semi-structured formats).
- algorithms for data sets of massive dimensionality.
- methodologies, infrastructure (system level issues) for
enabling community-level testing, evaluation and computation
facilities.
These areas have been chosen for their currency
and immediate relevance to the IDM specialist. For example, area 1 is
increasingly gathering attention in Web site management,
content personalization, and the design of internet portals. Area 2
has
relevance to the large-scale information retrieval, multidimensional
data mining, and knowledge discovery communities.
And finally, the third working group will help address the role of superstorage
systems for designing testbeds, reuse methodologies, automated
experiment management, and the role of recommender systems to aid in
automated algorithm selection.
All together, workshop activities should lead to an operational
plan for establishing and maintaining information resources that
will support the large IDM research and education community.
Advance Preparation:
In advance of the meeting, attendees will study
the IDM program
description,
PIs workshop reports,
IDM awards,
and other relevant
activities in industry and elsewhere.
Based on this, attendees will prepare short reports
to provide a
platform for recommending the infrastructure that would enable the IDM
community to be aware about relevant information.
Reporting
The recommendations of the workshop will stimulate community-wide
efforts
such as
(i) to advance the state-of-the-art in sharing of IDM software,
and (ii) to serve and extend education about IDM systems and algorithms.
In addition to reporting on a WWW site
(that will ultimately feed into an IDM Web site),
various publication venues will
be pursued. For example, with regard to aspects related to IR, there
is SIGIR Forum. Also, with regard to tools that are of pedagogical value,
a special issue of the new ACM Journal of Educational
Resources in Computing (JERIC) will be scheduled.
Workshop Coordinators
Edward A. Fox
Department of Computer Science
Virginia Tech, VA 24061
fox@vt.edu |
Layne T. Watson
Department of Computer Science
Virginia Tech, VA 24061
ltw@cs.vt.edu |
Naren Ramakrishnan
Department of Computer Science
Virginia Tech, VA 24061
naren@cs.vt.edu |
Steering Committee
Robert M. Akscyn, Knowledge Systems
Michael Berry, UTK
Alfonso F. Cardenas, UCLA
Don Kraft, LSU
W. Bruce Croft, U. Mass., Amherst
Edward A. Fox, Virginia Tech
Richard Furuta, Texas A & M
Alon Levy, University of Washington
Alberto Mendelzon, Univ. of Toronto
Gultekin Ozsoyoglu, CWRU
Naren Ramakrishnan, Virginia Tech
Layne T. Watson, Virginia Tech
Ellen Voorhees, NIST
Clement Yu, U. Illinois, Chicago
|