EDBT

EDBT 2009 marks a turning point in the way this conference is ran. It is the first one that breaks with the two year cycle, offering a yearly platform for our community. Aside from teaming up with the ICDT, there has been a few major breakthroughs: number of submissions, review process innovations, and program size.

Submissions. We received 408 abstracts for the main track, 32 demo papers, and 7 short industrial papers. Numbers to be proud of, as they align with other international conferences in our field. The deadlines for abstract submission, final paper upload and notification were aligned with the neighboring conferences ICDE and ACM SIGMOD.

The industrial papers have been purposely limited to four pages. Research results from the industrial labs are on par with those of the research institutes. They don't need special treatment and this enables the industrial track to be used for what it originally meant, to provide a stage for product innovations. This year the panel sessions were dropped to favor acceptance of more good research papers. The workshops around the conference are often a well-targeted platform to explore new areas of research.

A common practice in our field is to roll rejected papers forward to the next conference. This leads to an ever growing pool of good papers or lottery submissions. We considered reducing the review load somewhat by also rolling forward paper assignments from ICDE. Due to time and logistic constraints we could not implement this strategy, but recommend it to future conferences. It would reduce the paper pool and increase the quality.

Review process. The review process was organised using the Conference Management Toolkit (CMT) sponsored by Microsoft Research. It has become a standard system for handling such large number of papers and reviews. The review process was purposely set tight with only six weeks for the reviewers to read, contemplate the contributions, and upload their reports. In line with previous years, the bulk (80 %) of these were received around the review deadline.

Another innovation was to give advanced notice during the discussion phase to authors whose paper most likely would not make it into the program. It was considered a gesture to these unfortunate authors and gave them an extra week to work on improvements for the next conference. Unfortunately, CMT did not allow also selective disclosure of the review reports yet.

Program structure. In line with recent conferences the pool of high-quality papers has grown, pushing the conference organisers to maximise the allotment of space to provide a stage for our research.

Saint Petersburg is a historical city where you can spent days in the Hermitage. This grandeur is extended to the location offered for the conference. It allowed for four parallel streams! A total of 2 keynotes, 92 high-quality papers, three tutorials, one industrial session and 12 demos could be accommodated in a tightly packed three day meeting. It marks EDBT 2009 as a memorable year of great scientific harvesting. A side visit to ICDT or extended stay to visit the workshops all make this trip scientifically and culturally rewarding.