The Second International Workshop on Ranking in Databases (DBRank'08) focuses on the semantics, the modeling and the implementation of ranking and ordering in database systems and applications. In recent years, there has been a great deal of interest in developing effective techniques for ad-hoc search and retrieval in relational databases, document and multimedia databases, scientific information systems, and so on. In particular, a large number of emerging applications require exploratory querying on such databases; examples include users wishing to search databases and catalogs of products such as homes, cars, cameras, restaurants, and photographs. To address the limitations of the traditional Boolean retrieval model in these emerging ad-hoc search and retrieval applications, Top-k queries and ranking query results are gaining increasing importance. In fact, in many of these applications, ranking is an integral part of the semantics, e.g., keyword search, similarity search in multimedia as well as document databases. The increasing importance of ranking is directly derived from the explosion in the volume of data handled by current applications. The sheer amount of data makes it almost impossible to process queries in the traditional compute-then-sort approach. Hence, ranking comes as a great tool for soliciting user preferences and data exploration.

DBRank aims at providing more insight into supporting ranking in database systems and will be an interesting addition to ICDE 2008; the workshop will be a great venue for the many research groups working on ranking worldwide, with a unique opportunity to share their experience in supporting ranking in various database systems, from relational to semi-structures and unstructured data; and on different levels from query formulation and preference modeling to query processing and optimization frameworks. The workshop covers (and is not limited to) the following topics:

* Ranking relational data
* Rank-aware query processing and optimization
* New fundamental developments in top-k algorithms
* Cost-models for top-k algorithms and operators
* User preference specification and query languages
* Ranking in Web and XML databases
* Learning user preferences and ranking functions
* Ranking in distributed and peer-to-peer databases
* Ranking as a data exploration tool
* Ranking queries in data streams and continuous monitoring systems
* Applications of ranking and top-k retrieval from databases
* Ranking multimedia data
* Domain-specific ranking, e.g., in bibliographic, biological, clinical, and scientific data

Submission

We welcome original, unpublished manuscripts for 8-pages papers inclusive of all references and figures. Papers should report completed results. Vision papers and descriptions of work-in-progress are also welcomed as short paper submissions (4 pages). Papers must be written in English, and formatted according to ICDE proceeding format. Electronic version of the workshop proceedings will be published by IEEE.