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WELCOME!

Information search has a close relationship with our daily lives, for example, the wide use of Web search engines to search for various data and information, across medias such as textual documents, images, and video. Vast amount of data has been accumulated on the Web and in the data repositories of enterprises, in the form of relational databases, XML, JSON and structured data embedded in text documents. Accessing these data in a traditional way requires users to have a good knowledge of structured query languages, and an accurate understanding of data schemas. In contrast, data exploration, including keyword search, querying by example and visualization enable users to access to heterogeneous representation of data in a natural and convenient manner, hence greatly improved the usability of the underlying data; this is one of the reasons why both database and information retrieval communities have a growing research interest in this area in recent years. In fact, keyword search and data exploration on structured data presents both challenges (e.g., the queries are inherently ambiguous and complex) and opportunities (e.g., judicious use of the meta-information can enhance the search result quality).

Apart from the structured and semi-structured data as represented in the form of relational databases and XML documents, we have witnessed a burgeoning interest in data exploration on new forms of data, for example, JSON collections, spatial and multimedia data. In addition, large amount of social media data has been created every minute on the Internet, including blogs, user comments, and tweets. We can exploit the structures within and across the social media documents to improves search quality and detect many useful information and relations that are hard to be found by conventional approaches using only the unstructured characteristics.

The aim of this workshop is to provide a forum for both academic researchers and industrial practitioners to discuss opportunities and challenges in keyword search and data exploration for structured data, and to present the key issues and novel techniques in this area. In this workshop, we invite researchers from academia and industry working in relational databases, data warehouses, NoSQL databases, information extraction, natural language processing, probabilistic databases, social networks, social media data, spatial data, and related areas to submit their original papers. The main topics include, but not limited to:

• Keyword search and data exploration on relational databases and data warehouses
• Keyword search and data exploration on XML and RDF data
• Keyword search and data exploration on spatial data
• Keyword search and data exploration on social media data
• Keyword search and data exploration on structured data extracted from text documents
• Keyword on other data structures (e.g. workflows, annotated images)
• Keyword search and data exploration on data streams and continuous monitoring systems
• Handling data uncertainty in keyword search and data exploration
• Results ranking, evaluation and snippet generation on keyword search and data exploration
• Data visualization on structured data
• Query by example on structured data
• User preferences and feedback