MOD

This is the first time that SIGMOD is held in Asia and the second time that it is held outside North America. The amazing growth rates of China in both its technology and economy fronts do not alter the image of its capital city, Beijing, being an ancient city whose recorded history stretches back more than 3,000 years. With a landscape dotted with ancient palaces and temples in the midst of modern infrastructure and architecture, Beijing is indeed a good venue for a forum of serious academic and professional exchanges, and an ideal place for meaningful entertainment and cultural immersion on the side.

As in previous two years, SIGMOD 2007 accepted all papers that the Program Committee considered appropriate to accept, with no predefined "quota" based on the duration of the conference or other non-technical factors. The 88 members of the Program Committee were very thorough and dedicated, and accepted only 70 papers out of the 480 submissions giving an acceptance ratio of 14.6% (which is slightly higher than SIGMOD 2006). We adopted the author feedback process started in SIGMOD 2005 and the two-phase review process initiated in SIGMOD 2006. Two reviews were requested for every paper in the first phase and only papers that were deemed interesting by at least one of the two reviewers were considered for an additional review and for follow-up discussions. However, for a small number of papers, the third review was initiated due to the uncertainty shown in the first two reviews. In total, around 60% of the submissions were reviewed in the second phase and the author feedback process was then initiated for papers in which the Program Committee had a divided opinion or explicitly sought for feedback. All submissions were then actively discussed during the 18 days of online discussion. The double-blind reviewing process was further strengthened in SIGMOD 2007 by the non posting requirement of the submitted papers on the web during the reviewing period. For the benefit of the authors, the review process and the author feedback dates were clearly stated in the submission guidelines.

In SIGMOD 2007, we have invited three distinguished members from our own community as keynote speakers. As in SIGMOD 2006, we have a plenary session on SIGMOD Awards Technical talks, apart from the research papers, industrial talks, demos and tutorials. For the industrial talks, there is a session dedicated to database system development in the Far East industry. The quality and variety of the research papers, industrial talks, demos, tutorials, invited and keynote presentations have allowed us to assemble a diverse and vibrant technical program. However, with the increase in the number of research and industrial papers, as well as the plenary session, we now have five parallel tracks compared to the usual four.