CIKM 2009 in Hong Kong

With Min Kyoung Sung who is a coauthor of  ‘SPIDER : A System for Scalable, Parallel / Distributed Evaluation of large-scale RDF Data‘, I participated in 18th ACM CIKM 2009 (Conference on Information and Knowledge Management) held in Hong Kong. We stayed in Marriott Hotel near the Asia World-Expo at which CIKM 2009 held. At this conference, I got along with several Korean researchers (Kyong-Ha Lee, Jinoh Oh, and Sangchul Kim) and I discussed about SPIDER with some researchers who are interested in RDF data processing during the demonstration session.

At CIKM 2009, I felt that the recent trend of web data management are being changed to information extraction and semantic or structured web data rather then unstructured data. Many papers and posters addressed these issues. In addition, the subject of the panel was ‘ Information extraction meets relational databases: Where are we heading?’ One of the panel said that the hot spot of web data management research changes from crawling, indexing, and searching to information extraction and semantic data. These changes lead to new various data and knowledge management issues. Besides information extraction, graph data mining was one of the main hot issues in CIKM 2009.

At the main keynote, Kyu-Young Hwang (KAIST, Korea) spoke ‘DB-IR Integration and Its Application to a Massively-Parallel Search Engine.’ Its key subject is that DB-IR integration is becoming one of major challenges in the database area, so it is leading to new DBMS architecture applicable to DB-IR integration. In addition, Edward Chang (Google Research China) and Clement Yu (University of Illinois at Chicago) spoke ‘Confucius and its intelligent Disciples‘ and ‘Advanced Metasearch Engines‘ respectively.

This conference was a really nice experience for me. I enjoyed the conference, reception, and banquet. However, I have an unsatisfied feeling because I didn’t participate in the 1st Workshop CloudDB 2009 in conjunction in CIKM 2009.

Anyway, this conference inspired Min Kyoung Sung and me. It may be kept in our mind for long time.