XIME-P 2008 invites original research contributions as well as reports on industrial efforts on the implementation, utilization, and overall prospects of XQuery. Like the earlier editions of the XIME-P workshop series, XIME-P 2008 will be held just after ACM SIGMOD/PODS conference in Vancouver, Canada.

One year ago, the family of XQuery specifications achieved W3C Recommendation status, and several industrial-strength XQuery implementations have become available since then. In particular, all major DBMS vendors have extended their RDBMS products with XML features and with varying degrees of XQuery support. In addition, there are companies who are using XQuery for content management, web services, etc. A comprehensive list of XQuery implementations can be found at the W3C. With this strong interest in XQuery, the standardization effort for the next version of XQuery is under way, with a focus on more powerful features, such as updates, full-text and scripting extensions.

One of the fascinating aspects of XQuery is that work on the language specification and its implementation is happening on the verge of database systems, information retrieval, document processing, and programming languages. For example, XQuery full-text extensions aim at striking a balance between the worlds of structured and unstructured data. XQuery has attracted users from a wide variety of application domains, and its use is not limited to traditional DB server architectures. Computer science research and industry have found quite a number of promising -- and sometimes completely disjoint -- avenues to approach the challenges resulting from these different XQuery usage scenarios. This ''heterogeneity'' in contributions and attendees has been a source of lively discussions, panels, and an interesting technical program for previous XIME-P editions.

The XIME-P 2008 program will feature talks and panels on research as well as demonstrations and industrial efforts on the implementation and utilization of XQuery.
XIME-P 2008 Topics of Interest

Topics of interest include the following (though interesting and/or innovative papers on all aspects of XQuery are welcome):

* XQuery variants and extensions
o Coherent XQuery subsets
o Embedded XQuery
o Distributed XQuery
o Scripting /programming with XQuery
o XQuery full-text extensions
* XQuery applications and architectures
o The role of XQuery in Web 2.0
o XQuery and computing in the sciences
o XQuery for information retrieval
* Optimization of XQuery for demanding applications
o Compilation vs. interpretation
o Cost-based optimization strategies
o Schema-awareness in storage and processing
* XQuery lessons learned
o Performance evaluation
o XQuery debugging
o Teaching XQuery

Keynote Speech
Jim Melton (Oracle, XQuery W3C Working Group Chair) will deliver the XIME-P 2008 workshop's keynote address.
Paper Submission

XIME-P 2008 calls for original contributions relevant to the open list of topics sketched above. We explicitly welcome ''war stories'', and reports on innovative, off-beat, and ''early stage'' approaches to the implementation and application of XQuery as long as the submission meets the high quality standards of the XIME-P workshop series.

* - Papers should be formatted according to the ACM guidelines and SIG proceedings templates.
* - Papers should not exceed 6 pages in length (including references and appendices). The mandatory submission file format is PDF.

The primary publication medium for XIME-P has been and will be SIGMOD DiSC. This mode of publication ensures wide dissemination and high visibility (e.g., in the ACM Digital Library and Michael Ley's DBLP index). Online proceedings will additionally be hosted at the workshop web site.
Important Dates
Paper submission: Fri, March 28, 2008, 5 pm PDT
Notification of acceptance: Fri, May 2, 2008
Camera-ready copy due: Fri, May 16, 2008
Workshop: Fri, June 13, 2008
Workshop Co-Chairs
Carl-Christian Kanne
University of Mannheim
Mannheim, Germany
Fatma Ã?zcan
IBM Almaden Research Center
San Jose CA, USA
Program Committee
Denilson Barbosa University of Calgary
Giorgio Ghelli University of Pisa
Torsten Grust Technical University Munich
Mary Holstege MarkLogic
Yannis Papakonstantinou UCSD
Michael Rys Microsoft
Jayavel Shanmugasundaram Yahoo Research
John Snelson Oracle
Jens Teubner IBM Watson Research Center
Till Westmann BEA Software

Please address questions or comments to the workshop chairs directly.