Indexes and Computation over Compressed Structured Data

Summary

The Dagstuhl Seminar "Indexes and Computation over Compressed Structured Data" took place from June 2nd to 7th, 2013. The aim was to bring together researchers from various research directions of compression and indexing of structured data. Compression, and the ability to compute directly over compressed structures, is a topic that is gaining importance as digitally stored data volumes are increasing at unprecedented speeds. Of particular interest is the combination of compression schemes with indexes that give fast access to particular operations. The seminar was meant to inspire the exchange of theoretical results and practical requirements related compression and indexing. These points were addressed in particular

• Tractability versus Intractability for Algorithmic Problems on Compressed Data
• Compression Algorithms for Strings, Trees, and Graphs
• Indexes for Compressed Data
• Algorithms for Compressed Data
• Better Search Results: Ranking and TF/IDF
• Applications of Structure Compression to other Areas

The seminar fully satisfied our expectations. The 34$participants from 1$ countries (Canada, Chile, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Israel, Japan, Spain, and US) had been invited by the organizers to give survey talks about their recent research related to the topic of the seminar. The talks covered topics related to compression (e.g. grammar-based string compression) databases (e.g., XML, and top-k query answering), data structures (e.g. wavelet tries), string matching, and ranged to broad application areas such as biology. Most talks were followed by lively discussions. Smaller groups formed naturally which continued these discussions later.

We thank Schloss Dagstuhl for the professional and inspiring atmosphere. Such an intense research seminar is possible because Dagstuhl so perfectly meets all researchers' needs. For instance, elaborate research discussions in the evening were followed by local wine tasting or by heated sauna sessions.