This initiative follows the successful first edition (FlexDBIST-06) held in Krakow in September 2006. and second edition (FlexDBIST-07) held in Regensburg in September 2007. As the previous editions, the workshop is aimed at yielding a cross-fertilisation in the specific field.

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 â??how to take advantage from such large volumes of data, in order to extract useful information for decision making, for discovering and sharing useful knowledge, etc. ?â??.
In other words, they need technology for Flexible Data Management in Databases and Information Systems.

Several researchers are dealing with Flexible Data Management in Databases and Information Systems.
Researchers working on data models and techniques able to manage imprecise and uncertain data in databases are proposing database models able to deal with imprecision and uncertainty in the data modelling phase, as well as during querying. They generally come either from the database community or from the soft computing community, and are separately dealing with the topic. Researchers working on data warehousing techniques have to face problems concerning flexible management of heterogeneous and historical data in multidimensional views of data; since data come from heterogeneous sources, and their structure changes in time, flexible techniques for managing data collected in data warehouses are needed. 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; flexibility must be intended not only as the need to deal with heterogeneous and imprecise source data, but also as the need to deal with several formats for extracted patterns and knowledge (which is the focus of Inductive Databases).
The Information Retrieval community, that is providing solutions for Web search engines, is now moving towards new emerging research themes, 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, problems that are faced by the database and data mining communities as well.

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. 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.



Topics

The topics of the Workshop include but are not limited to the followings:

* Database models for data mining, knowledge discovery and/or information retrieval applications.
* Query languages for data miming or information retrieval.
* Text Mining.
* Inductive databases.
* Data Mining and/or Information Retrieval over collections of semi-structured data or documents.
* Integration of data mining and /or database and/or Information Retrieval.
* Categorization of data items or semi-structured documents.
* Cross-language Information Retrieval.
* Document indexing.
* Database models for uncertain, imprecise, incomplete and vague data.
* Database models for flexible data warehouses.
* Database models for data mining and knowledge discovery.
* Database models for information retrieval applications.
* Query languages dealing with imprecision and vagueness.
* Query languages for flexible data warehouses.
* Query languages for data miming and knowledge discovery.
* Query languages for information retrieval.
* Flexible management of (vague or uncertain) Spatial and Spatio-temporal data.
* Data Mining and Information Retrieval over uncertain data.
* Text Mining.
* Flexible languages for data or text mining.
* Inductive databases.
* Flexible management of (collections of) semi-structured data and documents (XML).
* Uncertain, imprecise, incomplete and vague semi-structured data.
* Data mining and knowledge discovery applied to semi-structured data.
* Information retrieval applied to semi-structured data.
* Integrated approaches.
* Flexible management of large volumes of data.
* Flexible techniques for security and intrusion detection in Information Systems and Databases
* Geographic Information Retrieval
Location-based Retrieval



Submission of papers

* Papers should be original and not previously published elsewhere. Basic, applied research and position papers are solicited.

* Papers should not exceed 5 pagers, formatted following the formatting instructions available on the IEEE Computer Society web site; the LaTeX style files can be dowloaded here as well. Papers that fail to comply to length limitations risk rejection.

* Electronic submissions in PDF format only are accepted. Please note that hard copy and fax submissions will not be accepted.

* Precise submission instructions can be found on the workshop web site.

* Workshop Proceedings will be published by IEEE Computer Society Press.



Final Version

Papers will be published in the workshop proceedings. Papers should not exceed 5 pagers, formatted following the two-column IEEE Computer Society style..



Important Dates

* Paper Submission: March 18, 2008
* Notification of Acceptance: April 24, 2008
* Camera-Ready Copy Due: May 15, 2008
* Symposium: September 1-5, 2008