Communications - June 2009

Prior to the meeting, a team led by one of the participants performed a bit of ad hoc data analysis over database conference bibliographies from the DBLP repository (dblp.uni-trier. de). While the effort was not scientific, the results indicated that the database research community has doubled in size over the past decade, as suggested by several metrics: number of published papers, number of distinct authors, number of distinct institutions to which these authors belong, and number of session topics at conferences, loosely defined. This served as a backdrop to the discussion that followed. An open question is whether this phenomenon is emerging at larger scales—in computer science and in science in general. If so, it may be useful to discuss the management of growth at those larger scales.

The growth of the database community puts pressure on the content and processes of database research publications. In terms of content, the increasingly technical scope of the community makes it difficult for individual researchers to keep track of the field. As a result, survey articles and tutorials are increasingly important to the community. These efforts should be encouraged informally within the community, as well as via professional incentive structures (such as academic tenure and promotion in industrial labs). In terms of processes, the reviewing load for papers is increasingly burdensome, and there was a perception at the Claremont meeting that the quality of reviews had been decreasing. It was suggested at the meeting that the lack of face-to-face program-commit-tee meetings in recent years has exacerbated the problem of poor reviews and removed opportunities for risky or speculative papers to be championed effectively over well-executed but more pedestrian work.

There was some discussion at the meeting about recent efforts— notably by ACM-SIGMOD and VLDB— to enhance the professionalism of papers and the reviewing process via such mechanisms as double-blind reviewing and techniques to encourage experimental repeatability. Many participants were skeptical that the efforts to date have contributed to long-term research quality, as measured in

intellectual and practical relevance. At the same time, it was acknowledged that the database community’s growth increases the need for clear and clearly enforced processes for scientific publication. The challenge going forward is to find policies that simultaneously reward big ideas and risk-taking while providing clear and fair rules for achieving these rewards. The publication venues would do well to focus as much energy on processes to encourage relevance and innovation as they do on processes to encourage rigor and discipline.

In addition to tuning the mainstream publication venues, there is an opportunity to take advantage of other channels of communication. For example, the database research community has had little presence in the relatively active market for technical books. Given the growing population of developers working with big data sets, there is a need for accessible books on scalable data-management algorithms and techniques that programmers can use to build software. The current crop of college textbooks is not targeted at this market. There is also an opportunity to present database research contributions as big ideas in their own right, targeted at intellectually curious readers outside the specialty. In addition to books, electronic media (such as blogs and wikis) can complement technical papers by opening up different stages of the research life cycle to discussion, including status reports on ongoing projects, concise presentation of big ideas, vision statements, and speculation. Online fora can also spur debate and discussion if appropriately provocative. Electronic media underscore the modern reality that it is easy to be widely published but much more difficult to be widely read. This point should be reflected in the mainstream publication context, as well as by authors and reviewers. In the end, the consumers of an idea define its value.

Given the growth in the database research community, the time is ripe for ambitious projects to stimulate collaboration and cross-fertilization of ideas. One proposal is to foster more data-driven research by building a globally shared collection of structured data, accepting contributions

from all parties. Unlike previous efforts in this vein, the collection should not be designed for any particular benchmark; in fact, it is likely that most of the interesting problems suggested by this data are as yet unidentified.

There was also discussion at the meeting of the role of open source software development in the database community. Despite a tradition of open source software, academic database researchers have only rarely reused or shared software. Given the current climate, it might be useful to move more aggressively toward sharing software and collaborating on software projects across institutions. Information integration was mentioned as an area in which such an effort is emerging.

Finally, interest was expressed in technical competitions akin to the Netflix Prize ( www.netflixprize. com) and KDD Cup ( www.sigkdd.org/ kddcup/ index.php) competitions. To kick off this effort in the database domain, meeting participants identified two promising areas for competitions: system components for cloud computing (likely measured in terms of efficiency) and large-scale information extraction (likely measured in terms of accuracy and efficiency). While it was noted that each of these proposals requires a great deal of time and care to realize, several participants volunteered to initiate efforts. That work has begun with the 2009 SIGMOD Programming Contest (db.csail.mit. edu/sigmod09contest).

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