DBPL 2013

DBPL 2013

I attended DBPL 2013 in Riva Del Garda, Italy - a very attractive venue.  I was stupid and only came for the day of the workshop.  There were a lot of interesting talks.

• Serge Abiteboul gave an invited talk on WebDAM (a Datalog-like language for Web data management) and access control problems, including controlling who can see what data based on its provenance.
• Alex Ulrich gave a nice talk on his work with Torsten Grust on defunctionalization for XQuery and PL/SQL.
• Jerome Simeon (IBM) presented an invited talk about NoSQL languages and more specifically on recent work on typechecking for languages such as Jaql and MongoDB's query language.
• Stephanie Scherzinger spoke on work with Meike Klettke and Uta Störl on schema evolution for NoSQL data.  This was a very nice talk: basically, though one of the main motivations for NoSQL in the first place is agility allowed by not having to define a schema in advance, over time the changes become hard to manage and you want principled ways of migrating data from old formats as data structure conventions change.
• Soren Lassen (Facebook) gave an invited talk about Facebook's graph search (the Unicorn engine)
• Radu Ciucanu spoke about work with Slawek Staworko on inference of unordered XML schemas from data.
• My talk was on XML access control and static enforcement checks.  This is actually work I did a while ago (2007-8) and never got around to writing up properly.  I'm glad I finally got it written down and the talk seemed to go well.
• The final talk was by Yasunori Ishihara (I think; I didn't catch the speaker's name) on joint work with several others on XPath satisfiability with respect to a DTD.  The main idea seems to be to identify 

I enjoyed the event, but I didn't see as many people.  It is not clear whether this is because they are working on other topics or whether it has become easier or more rewarding to publish this type of work in other places (particularly ICDT, which became an annual event in 2009).  Over the last 10 years DBPL had a lot of papers on XML, and it hasn't recovered as interest in XML has waned and other topics have become more popular.  In 2011 DBPL solicited shorter papers and didn't publish a formal proceedings; this year the proceedings was formal and hosted by arXiv.org.  I think there is as much need for a venue like DBPL as ever, but I'm not sure what needs to be done here.