ICDT: the International Conference on Database Theory

What is ICDT?

ICDT is a scientific conference on research on the foundations of database systems; it can be seen as the European version of PODS (the ACM Symposium on Principles of Database Systems). Having a European identity, it is typically held in beautiful historical European locations.

Overview of ICDT conferences

#
 Year/Homepage
 Where
 When
PC Chair(s)
 Proceedings
Special Issue
 ACM TODS
18
 EDBT/ICDT 2015
 Brussels, Belgium
Marcelo Arenas


17
 EDBT/ICDT 2014
 Athens, Greece
 March 24-27
 Nicole Schweikardt


16
 EDBT/ICDT 2013 Genova, Italy March 18-21
 Wang Chiew Tan Proceedings

15
 EDBT/ICDT 2012 Berlin, Germany March 26-30
 Alin Deutsch
 Proceedings

14
 EDBT/ICDT 2011 Uppsala, Sweden March 21-24
 Tova Milo
 Proceedings ToCS 52(3)
 TODS 37(3)
13
 EDBT/ICDT 2010 Lausanne, Switzerland March 23-26
 Luc Segoufin
 Proceedings LMCS
 TODS 36(4)
12
 EDBT/ICDT 2009 Saint Petersburg, Russia March 23-26
 Ronald Fagin
 Proceedings ToCS 49(2) TODS 35(4)
11
 ICDT 2007
 Barcelona, Spain
 January 10-12
 Thomas Schwentick, Dan Suciu
 Proceedings
 ToCS 44(4) TODS 33(4)
10
 ICDT 2005
 Edinburgh, Scotland
 January 5-7
 Thomas Eiter, Leonid Libkin
 Proceedings TCS 371(3) TODS 31(3)
9
 ICDT 2003
 Siena, Italy
 January 8-10
 Maurizio Lenzerini, Rajeev Motwani
 Proceedings TCS 336(1) TODS 29(4)
8
 ICDT 2001 London, UK
 January 4-6 Jan Van den Bussche, Victor Vianu
 Proceedings TCS 296(3)
7
 ICDT 1999 Jerusalem, Israel
 January 10-12 Catriel Beeri, Peter Buneman
 Proceedings

6
 ICDT 1997 Delphi, Greece
 January 8-10 Foto Afrati, Phokion Kolaitis
Proceedings TCS 239(2)
5
 ICDT 1995 Prague, Czech Republic
 January 11-13 Georg Gottlob, Moshe Vardi
 Proceedings TCS 190(2)
4
 ICDT 1992 Berlin, Germany
 January 14-16 Joachim Biskup, Richard Hull
 Proceedings TCS 149(1)
3
 ICDT 1990 Paris, France
 January 12-14 Serge Abiteboul, Paris Kannelakis
 Proceedings TCS 116(1-2)
2
 ICDT 1988 Bruges, Belgium
 August 31 - September 2
 Jan Paredaens
 Proceedings TCS 76(1)
1
 ICDT 1986
 Rome, Italy
 September 8-10 Giorgio Ausiello
 Proceedings TCS 62(1-2)



ICDT proceedings and special issues

Until 2007, proceedings of ICDT conferences have been published in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. Excellent bibliographical coverage of ICDT is provided by DBLP, featuring also the SIGMOD Anthology containing electronic copies of past ICDT proceedings. Since 2009, when the  collaboration with EDBT began, the proceedings no longer appear in LNCS. Rather, they appear in the ACM Digital Library, in the ACM International Conference Proceedings Series. Access is free, but requires a free ACM Web Account. Moreover, the proceedings since 2009 can be freely accessed at EDBT and directly from the above table.

Until 2005, special issues on ICDT appeared in the journal Theoretical Computer Science. Since 2007, a special issue or special section is published in the journal Theory of Computing Systems (TOCS).  An exception was ICDT 2010, whose selected papers were published in a special issue of the journal Logical Methods in Computer Science.  

Furthermore, since 2003, ICDT collaborates with the ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS) in the selection of two papers from the conference that can become invited TODS articles.

ICDT Council

The ICDT Council is a group of people overseeing the organization of the ICDT series. It consists of previous and future PC chairs and some members at large. It was long chaired by Jan Paredaens and afterwards by Jan Van den Bussche.  It is currently composed as follows: Christine Collet (President of EDBT), Alin Deutsch (PC chair 2012), Tova Milo (PC chair 2011), Frank Neven, Nicole Schweikardt (PC chair 2014), Thomas Schwentick,  and Wang Chiew Tan (PC chair 2013). The current chair is Thomas Schwentick. 

A brief history

In the mid 1980s, database theory was not very active in Europe, the only initiatives organized in Europe being the workshops on logic and databases organized by Gallaire and Minker. A small group of people (Paolo Atzeni, Serge Abiteboul, Giorgio Ausiello, Catriel Beeri, Jan Paredaens, Domenico Sacca, Nicholas Spyratos) felt that there was a need to have a regular international forum for European researchers in database theory. This motivated a couple of successful Summer Schools on Theoretical Issues in Data Bases (Cozenza, Italy; Benaudet, France). Eventually, the International Conference on Database Theory was created. Since then, database theory has flourished, with the ACM Symposium on Principles of Database Systems organized annually in the US, and ICDT biennually in Europe.

From 1995 on the series of MFDBS conferences (which can be considered the Eastern-European version of ICDT) merged in with the ICDT series. (However, the FoIKS initiative can be understood as a resurrection of MFDBS.) At about the same time, the ties with the EDBT Endowment and the series of EDBT conferences were strengthened to unify the European Database Community.  International from a scientific viewpoint, ICDT definitely has a European flavor. It is traditionally held in beautiful historical European locations.

Since 2009, EDBT and ICDT are held jointly, following the model of the successful series of SIGMOD/PODS joint conferences.

ICDT awards

ICDT gives several awards with the following rules:
ICDT 1990 Best Student Paper: Peter Revesz A closed form for Datalog queries with integer order

ICDT 1995 Best Student Paper: Dan Suciu Domain-independent queries on databases with external functions

ICDT 2005 Best Newcomer Award: Albert Atserias Conjunctive query evaluation by search tree, revisited

ICDT 2007 Best Newcomer Award: Piotr Wieczorek Complexity of Typechecking XML Views of Relational Databases

ICDT 2009 Best Student Paper: Todd J. Green Containment of conjunctive queries on annotated relations

ICDT 2009 Best Paper Award: Foto Afrati and Phokion G. Kolaitis Repair Checking in Inconsistent Databases: Algorithms and Complexity

ICDT 2010 Best Student Paper: Diego Figueira Forward XPath and extended register automata on data trees and André Hernich Answering non-monotonic queries in relational data exchange

ICDT 2010 Best Paper Award: Marcelo Arenas, Ronald Fagin, Alan Nash Composition with target constraints

ICDT 2011 Best Student Paper Award: Daniel Deutch  Querying Probabilistic Business Processes for Sub-Flows

ICDT 2011 Best Paper Award: Claire David, Leonid Libkin, and Tony Tan  Efficient Reasoning about Data Trees via Integer Linear Programming

ICDT 2012 Best Newcomer Paper Award: Christian Konrad and Frederic Magnie  Validating XML Documents in the Streaming Model with External Memory

ICDT 2012 Best Paper Award: Balder Ten Cate, Victor Dalmau, and Phokion Kolaitis  Learning Schema Mappings

ICDT 2013 Best Paper Award: Chao Li, Daniel Li, Gerome Miklau and Dan Suciu:  A Theory of Pricing Private Data

ICDT Test-of-time Award

In 2013, ICDT started to give a Test-of-time Award for the paper (or a small number of papers) that  has had the most impact in terms of research, methodology, conceptual contribution, or transfer to practice since it appeared in the proceedings of ICDT. In years with odd numbers and from 2020 on in all years, it is given to the best such paper of the ICDT conference that took place ten years ago. However, in 2014, 2016, and 2018 it will be given to papers that appeared before 2003 as detailed in the table below.

Year
 Eligible Conferences
 Winner
2013
 ICDT 2003
 Ronald Fagin, Phokion Kolaitis, Renee Miller, and Lucian Popa
Data Exchange: Semantics and Query Answering
2014
 ICDT 1986-1992
2015
 ICDT 2005
2016
 ICDT 1995 & 1997
2017
 ICDT 2007
2018
 ICDT 1999 & 2001
2019
 ICDT 2009

Past invited speakers

1986: Paris Kanellakis, Carlo Zaniolo, Ashok Chandra

1988: Serge Abiteboul, Catriel Beeri, Nancy Lynch

1990: Ronald Fagin, Jean-Marie Nicolas

1992: Gyula Katona, Jack Minker, M.Sh. Tsalenko

1995: Tomasz Imielinski, Jan Paredaens

1997: Serge Abiteboul, Jeffrey Ullman, Heikki Mannila

1999: Malcolm Atkinson, Maurizio Lenzerini, Christos Papadimitriou

2001: Andrei Broder, Leonid Libkin, Philip Wadler

2003: Hector Garcia-Molina, Yannis Ioannidis, Limsoon Wong

2005: Moshe Y. Vardi, Michael Schwartzbach, David Maier

2007: Laura Haas, Jan Chomicki, Cynthia Dwork

2009: Georg Gottlob, Victor Vianu

2010: Amol Deshpande, Pierre Fraigniaud, Martin Grohe

2011: Susan Davidson, Dan Suciu, Jeff Ullman

2012: Wenfei Fan, Erich Grädel

2013: Yehoshua Sagiv, Luc Segoufin, Jan Van den Bussche

Past ICDT program committees

1986: Serge Abiteboul, Giogio Ausiello (chair), Francois Bancilhon, Alessandro D'Atri, Marina Moscarini, John Mylopoulos, Jean-Marie Nicolas, Jurg Nievergelt, Christos Papadimitriou, Jan Paredaens, Domenico Sacca, Nicholas Spyratos, Jeffrey Ullman, Moshe Vardi

1988: Francois Bancilhon, Joachim Biskup, Wiebren Dejonge, Marc Gyssens, Richard Hull, Gerhard Jaeschke, Paris Kanellakis, Per-Ake Larson, Meral Oszoyoglu, Jan Paredaens (chair), Domenico Sacca, Dirk Van Gucht

1990: Serge Abiteboul (co-chair), Paolo Atzeni, Catriel Beeri, Nicole Bidoit, Stavros Cosmadakis, Richard Hull, Tomasz Imielinski, Paris Kanellakis (co-chair), Christophe Lecluse, Maurice Nivat, Jan Paredaens, Hans Schek, Joachim Schmidt, Moshe Vardi

1992: Serge Abiteboul, Foto Afrati, Nicole Bidoit, Joachim Biskup (co-chair), Georg Gottlob, Richard Hull (co-chair), Leonid Kalinichenko, Georg Lausen, Udo Lipeck, Nancy Lynch, Jeffrey Naughton, Jan Paredaens, Kiri-Jouko Raiha, Domenico Sacca, Yehoshua Sagiv, Alex Stolboushkin, Letizia Tanca, Bernhard Thalheim, Mihalis Yannakakis, Jiri Zlatuska

1995: Paolo Atzeni, Stefano Ceri, Jan Chomicki, Janos Demetrovics, Georg Gottlob (co-chair), Stephane Grumbach, Ravi Krishnamurthy, Georg Lausen, Heikki Mannila, Marina Moscarini, Jaroslav Pokorny, Doron Rotem, Joachim Schmidt, Oded Shmueli, Letizia Tanca, Bernhard Thalheim, Lars Valiev, Jan Van den Bussche, Moshe Vardi (co-chair), Gottfried Vossen, Peter Widmayer

1997: Foto Afrati (co-chair), Marco Cadoli, Surajit Chaudhuri, Sophie Cluet, Janos Demetrovics, Thomas Eiter, Christos Faloutsos, Sergio Greco, Marc Gyssens, Gyula Katona, Phokion Kolaitis (co-chair), Gabriel Kuper, Tova Milo, Meral Oszoyoglu, Jaroslav Pokorny, Vladimir Sazonov, Hans Schek, Eljas Soisalon-Soininen, Jianwen Su, Val Tannen, Dirk Van Gucht, Gottfried Vossen, Pierre Wolper, Jiri Zlatuska

1999: Gustavo Alonzo, Catriel Beeri (co-chair), Tony Bonner, Peter Buneman (co-chair), Marco Cadoli, Sophie Cluet, Guozhu Dong, Ron Fagin, Erich Graedel, Gosta Grahne, Marc Gyssens, Yannis Ioannidis, Alon Levy, Alberto Mendelzon, Guido Moerkotte, Shelly Quian, Ken Ross, Timos Sellis, Eric Simon, Dan Suciu, S. Sudarsan, Michael Taitslin

2001: Michael Benedikt, Nicole Bidoit, Surajit Chaudhuri, Thomas Eiter, Martin Grohe, Maurizio Lenzerini, Mark Levene, Tova Milo, Ken Ross, Thomas Schwentick, Luc Segoufin, Timos Sellis, Dan Suciu, Val Tannen, Jerzy Tyszkiewicz, Dirk Van Gucht, Jan Van den Bussche (co-chair), Moshe Vardi, Victor Vianu (co-chair), Gottfried Vossen, Peter Widmayer, Limsoon Wong

2003: Serge Abiteboul, Foto Afrati, Catriel Beeri, Stephan Bressan, Peter Buneman, Diego Calvanese, Surajit Chaudhuri, Ronald Fagin, Alon Halevy, Maurizio Lenzerini (co-chair), Heikki Mannila, Alberto Mendelzon, Guido Moerkotte, Rajeev Motwani (co-chair), Jeffrey Naughton, Yannis Papakonstantinou, Luigi Palopoli, Domenico Sacca, Vladimir Sazonov, Bernhard Thalheim, Jeffrey Ullman, Jan Van den Bussche, Vasilis Vassalos

2005: Lars Arge, Catriel Beeri, Michael Benedikt, Leopoldo Bertossi, Nicole Bidoit, Giuseppe De Giacomo, Thomas Eiter (co-chair), Wenfei Fan, Nicola Leone, Leonid Libkin (co-chair), Jerzy Marcinkowski, Yossi Matias, Gultekin Özsoyoglu, Rajeev Rastogi, Ken Ross, Thomas Schwentick, Kyuseok Shim, Eljas Soisalon-Soininen, Bernhard Thalheim, Jan Van den Bussche, Victor Vianu, Andrei Voronkov, Peter Widmayer

2007: Marcelo Arenas, Albert Atserias, Michael Benedikt, Diego Calvanese, Alin Deutsch, Amr El Abbadi, Wenfei Fan, Floris Geerts, Carlos Hurtado, Gyula O.H. Katona, Hans-Joachim Klein, Phokion Kolaitis, Gabriel Kuper, Kim S. Larsen, Chen Li, Maarten Marx, Kobbi Nissim, Thomas Schwentick (co-chair), Dan Suciu (co-chair), Stijn Vansummeren, Gottfried Vossen

2009: Albert Atserias, Denilson Barbosa, Pablo Barcelo, Leopoldo Bertossi, Mikolaj Bojanczyk, Diego Calvanese, Rada Chirkova, Sara Cohen, Cynthia Dwork, Alexandre Evfimievski, Ronald Fagin (chair), Floris Geerts, Sanjeev Khanna, Ravi Kumar, Leonid Libkin, Sebastian Maneth, Renee Miller, Kenneth Ross, Yehoshua Sagiv, Nicole Schweikardt, Kyuseok Shim, Balder ten Cate, Jan Van den Bussche, Stijn Vansummeren, Erik Vee

2010: Luc Segoufin (chair), Henrik Bjorklund, Toon Calders, Venkatesan Chakaravarthy, Edith Cohen, Sara Cohen, Alin Deutsch, Sudipto Guha, Claudio Gutierrez, Benny Kimelfeld, Solmaz Kolahi, Bart Kuijpers, Maurizio Lenzerini, Sebastian Maneth, Wim Martens, Dan Olteanu, Rina Panigrahy, Reinhard Pichler, Alkis Polyzotis, Cristina Sirangelo

2011: Tova Milo (chair), Foto Afrati, Diego Calvanese, Andrea Cali,  Edith Cohen, Sara Cohen,  Graham Cormode, Rada Chirkova, Alin Deutsch, Wenfei Fan, Todd J. Green, Kobbi Nissim, Frank Neven, Antonella Poggi, Ken Ross, Marie-Christine Rousset, Nicole Schweikardt, Pierre Senellart, Cristina Sirangelo, Jianwen Su, Wang-Chiew Tan

2012: Alin Deutsch (chair), Serge Abiteboul, Marcelo Arenas, Michael Benedikt, Bogdan Cautis, Edith Cohen, Rada Chirkova, Claire David, Daniel Deutch,  Ronald Fagin, Floris Geerts, Gosta Grahne, Richard Hull, Daniel Kifer, Maurizio Lenzerini, Wim Martens, Maarten Marx, Tova Milo, Anca Muscholl, Dan Suciu, Jan Van den Bussche

2013: Balder ten Cate, James Cheney, Jan Chomicki, Sara Cohen, Todd J. Green, Sudipto Guha, Benny Kimelfeld, Solmaz Kolahi, Kobbi Nissim, Antonella Poggi,  Riccardo Rosati, Nicole Schweikardt, Kyusheok Shim, Cristina Sirangelo, Slawek Staworko, Jianwen Su, Wang-Chiew Tan (Chair), Stijn Vansummeren, Victor Vianu, Jef Wijsen

In memoriam

We want to remember Paris C. Kanellakis, one of the first program chairs for ICDT.

We want to remember Alberto Mendelzon, who was originally all ready to serve as co-chair for ICDT 2007, but who sadly passed away on June 16th, 2005.

We want to remember Alan Nash, who posthumously received the ICDT 2010 best paper award.

Last updated: Tue Jun 16 2013
Thomas Schwentick