MOD

The 2003 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, was held June 10-12, 2003 in San Diego, California. This year, SIGMOD was part of the Federated Computing Research Conference (FCRC-2003), which included a total of 16 conferences and workshops. The SIGMOD conference is sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and its Special Interest Group on Management of Data (SIGMOD). As has become customary, two days of the conference were overlapped with the Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (PODS). In addition, there were a number of important events co-located with SIGMOD this year, including the 6th International Workshop on the Web and Databases (WebDB), the Workshop on Research Issues in Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery (DMKD), The Second International Workshop on Distributed Event-Based Systems (MPDS), The Workshop on Management and Processing of Data Streams, the Paris C. Kanellakis Memorial Workshop, and the Second Database Faculty Symposium.As in previous years, SIGMOD held its status as a leading forum for exchange of ideas and publication of new results on data management. Acceptance into the conference proceedings was extremely competitive. We received 342 submissions to the conference (up from 240 in 2002, i.e., over 40% increase). The program committee selected 53 papers for presentation and inclusion in the proceedings. These papers span the range of traditional database topics such as query processing, indexing and OLAP, to current issues of signifcant interest such as XML data management, data streaming, large-scale data sharing, and metadata management. The program committee worked hard to select these papers through a detailed review process and active discussion both electronically and at the program committee meeting held in January in Seattle. We used the CMT to run the entire submissions and review process for research papers, including the program committee meeting.In addition to the research track, we had 73 submissions to the Demonstrations track, of which 22 projects were invited to present. The Demonstrations track has become a key venue for the early dissemination of cutting-edge prototype and systems development experience. Juliana Freire chaired the demos program committee, which put together a diverse and exciting program. The Industrial program committee, chaired by Surajit Chaudhuri, took an active role in soliciting quality submissions and have put together a program that is a key component of this year's conference: not only were there 4 papers accepted through the submission process, but there were an additional 10 invited talks. Likewise, Mary Fernandez and Joe Hellerstein organized an excellent slate of Tutorials and Panels to round out the program. As a result of all these efforts, we have an especially strong and innovative program this year, with a good balance of academic and industrial representation.