In conjunction with DEXA-2010
International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications

Bilbao, Spain, August 30, September 3, 2010

Workshop web site: http://flexdbist.unibg.it

Information systems are able to deal with an incredible amount of data, concerning every aspect of real life. Data are dealt with by heterogeneous systems, concern heterogeneous application domains, are structured in heterogeneous data formats; furthermore, semi-structured (XML) or unstructured (textual) documents are becoming important data sources for enterprises and organizations.

Enterprises and organizations need to deal with such heterogeneous and often very large volumes of data, which may also be uncertain, imprecise and incomplete; for instance a typical question is “how to take advantage from such large (and possibly heterogeneous) volumes of data, in order to extract useful information for decision making, for discovering and sharing useful knowledge, etc. ?”. In other words, they need technology for Flexible Data Management in Databases and Information Systems.
Flexibility in such a context might be intended in several ways; some of them might be the following (but other may be found):

• the capability of easily querying large volumes of data, in order to obtain significant or useful descriptions;
• the capability of integrating heterogeneous data, possibly inconsistent, coming from different distributed and incoherent and data sources;
• the capability of integrating structured, semi-structured and unstructured (textual) data;
• the capability of managing changing in time data;
• the capability of modelling databases, defining query languages, building information systems dealing with large volumes of data, heterogeneous and distributed data, uncertain or imprecise data, changing in time data;
• the capability of dealing with security issues and intrusion detection in a flexible way.

Several researchers are dealing with Flexible Data Management in Databases and Information Systems. In particular, we can identify three main groups of researchers: those working on data models and techniques able to manage imprecise and uncertain data in databases, those working on database technologies for data warehousing, data mining and knowledge discovery techniques, and those working on information retrieval methodologies and techniques.
The management of imprecision and uncertainty in databases has become an important research area, which has known an impressive growth. Generally, this topic has been separately dealt with by the soft computing community within conferences such as FUZZIEEE, IFSA, FQAS, EUSFLAT (specific workshops on the management of imperfect information in fuzzy databases and IRSs have been organized in Yokohama 1996 and Barcelona 1999 within FUZZIEEE) and by the database community within conferences such as VLDB, IEEE ICDE, and specific workshops such as the "Post ILPS'94 Workshop on Uncertainty in Databases and Deductive Systems" and the DEXA 2004 Workshop on Supporting Imprecision and Uncertainty in Flexible Databases (SIUFDB-04).
Researchers working on data mining and knowledge discovery techniques are providing technology and tools for discovering useful and/or unexpected information from large volumes of data; in particular, several researchers of this area recognized that a strong integration between data mining tools and databases is necessary to foster the day by day exploitation of such techniques. This is why there are several specialized conferences on the topic, such as IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM), International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (PKDD), Pacific Asian Conference on Knowledge Discovery in Databases (PAKDD), and the three PKDD International Workshops on Knowledge Discovery in Inductive Databases (KDID02, KDID03, KDID04). Nonetheless, researchers working on data warehousing techniques have to face problems concerning flexible management of heterogeneous and historical data in multidimensional views of data.
The Information Retrieval community consolidated several basic retrieval models such as the Boolean and Vector Space Model that are at the basis of the search engines available over the internet to search for information distributed on the Web. Nevertheless, the explosion of the Web has drawn the attention of recent research in IR towards new areas as testified by the programs of the main international conferences on IR such as ACM SIGIR, TREC, ACM SAC–IAR, and ECIR. The emerging research themes of IR research such as the definition of more effective techniques to index, categorize, filter and retrieve collections of multimedia documents heterogeneously structured and rapidly changing in time have come across problems also faced by the database and data mining communities.

The goal of the workshop is to bring together researchers working on methods and techniques for Flexible Data Management in Databases and information Systems in the broadest sense. Consequently, papers proposing models, methodologies and techniques concerning management of imprecise and uncertain data, data warehousing, data mining and knowledge discovery, spatial and spatio-temporal databases, as well as information retrieval are encouraged. Any kind of flexible data management issue is of interest: data models, query languages, textual and semi-structured data management, integrated application of different techniques (e.g. database, data mining and information retrieval methodologies and techniques). Position papers are also welcome and encouraged.

This initiative follows the successful first edition (FlexDBIST-06) held in Krakow in September 2006. the second edition (FlexDBIST-07) held in Regensburg in September 2007, the third edition (FlexDBIST-08) held in Turin in September 2008 and the fourth edition (FlexDBIST-09) held in Linz in September 2009, and is aimed at yielding a cross-fertilisation in the specific field as it was for the former edition. Furthermore, the workshop is the natural evolution of successful SIUFDB-04 (DEXA 2004 International Workshop on Supporting Imprecision and Uncertainty in Flexible Databases) and IDDI-05 (DEXA 2005 International Workshop on Integrating Data Mining, Databases and Information Retrieval), and like them it is aimed at yielding a cross-fertilisation in the specific field.

The workshop is organized by

Giuseppe Psaila
Università degli Studi di Bergamo
Facoltà di Ingegneria
Viale Marconi 5
24044 Dalmine (BG) - Italy
e-mail: psaila@unibg.it

Please do not hesitate to contact us for any question about the workshop.