Proceedings of the 13th Australasian database conference - Volume 5
Venue: ACM International Conference Proceeding Series; Vol. 18 (2002)

The papers in this volume were presented at the 13th Australasian Database Conference (ADC 2002), which was hosted by Monash University in Melbourne from 28 January to 2 February 2002, as a part of the 2002 Australasian Computer Science Week (ACSW), which also included a number of other conferences.The annual ADC series is a key forum for Australasian and international researchers in the area of databases to exchange new ideas and the development of new applications. This year ADC continues its tradition of attracting about 50% of submissions from Australia and New Zealand, and another 50% internationally (from 19 countries and regions). Each paper has been carefully reviewed by at least three members of an international program committee. The 24 papers in this volume include 22 papers selected by the program committee from 49 submissions, one keynote paper by Masaru Kitsuregawa of the University of Tokyo, and an invited paper by Beng Chin Ooi and Klan Lee Tan of the National University of Singapore. While the papers presented in this volume cover a wide range of both theoretical and pragmatic issues related to database systems, several themes have emerged, including management and retrieval of multidimensional data, such as spatial, text and image data, WWW and XML databases, and new database and information systems applications such as e-commerce. These trends are also reflected in the keynote speech and the invited paper. Some traditional topics, such as query processing and database integration and migration, have been revisited by several papers in this volume, in a new context or using a new approach.With a multi-year sponsorship from the VLDB Australasian Conference Fund, ADC 2002 established the Best Student Paper Award. All papers submitted ADC are eligible for contesting the award if the first author is a full-time student. The papers that received most nominations from the Program Committee members are presented to the Committee for final consideration. The clear winner of the inaugural Best Student Paper Award this year was Inga Stizmann, a PhD student from the University of Melbourne. The award paper, Compacting discriminator information of spatial trees, co-authored with Peter Stuckey, investigates how a small amount of space in an in-memory R-tree node can be used to make an R-tree more cache-conscious. Extensive performance studies demonstrated a significant performance improvement than existing R-trees.The Computer Science Association (CSA) welcomes all delegates to ACSW2002 at Monash University in Melbourne. CSA is proud of the continuing success of ACSW, the Australasian Computer Science Week. The week is the premier annual event in Australia and New Zealand to promote IT fundamentals. We believe strongly that IT research, as typified by the research presented at the conference, is essential for the future of our region. Government unfortunately often conflates IT fundamentals with IT skills. We should be constantly reminding Government and industry about the difference between IT fundamentals and IT skills.In the coming years, CSA is looking to increase its links with professional organisations worldwide. We are pleased that the Australian Computer Society is publishing this year's proceedings. We are looking to have the publications included in the ACM Digital Library. We look forward to a good future for IT research in Australia and New Zealand.