PREFACE

For over a decade, the COMAD International Conference on Management of Data, modeled along the lines of ACM SIGMOD, has been the premier database conference hosted in India. It was held on a close-to-annual basis until December 2000, after which various national and international database events, including ICDE in March 2003, have been hosted in India. We are now reviving the COMAD series with COMAD 2005, which will be held at the International Centre, Goa, India, from January 6-8, 2005. Goa is among the foremost tourist destinations in India, attracting an international clientele, due to its wonderful natural environment, including a variety of exquisite beaches, and a unique Indo-Portugese cultural flavor.

The Call for Papers attracted 55 research and industry submissions from 13 countries, reflecting COMAD's truly international appeal. Each paper was rigorously reviewed by three members of the program committee, which featured 53 database experts spanning across 15 countries. After substantial and detailed discussions on the conference bulletin board, 19 high-quality papers, which are included in this proceedings, were selected for presentation at the conference. We also went the extra mile to help authors by communicating to them specific reviewer concerns, and allowing them to respond to the comments, thereby facilitating the reviewers to make a more informed final judgment. In this sense, we anticipated the ACM Sigmod conference, which is featuring an author response-to-review option from this year.

The paper titled "Learning to extract information from large websites using sequential models", by V. G. Vinod Vydiswaran and Sunita Sarawagi from IIT Bombay, was selected for the Best Paper award. They present a novel algorithm, based on the recent mathematical technique of Conditional Random Fields, to accurately learn Website navigation paths. The paper titled "Efficient Handling of Sibling Axis in XPath", by G. V. Subramanyam and P. Sreenivasa Kumar from IIT Madras, was selected for the Best Student Paper award. They propose an efficient algorithm for processing XML queries that feature predicates requiring sideways traversals in the document tree.

Four invited tutorials, covering the spectrum from core database issues to middleware and applications, will be delivered by leading international experts. In addition, there are two panels on the future directions and societal impact of database research, which promise to stimulate thought-provoking discussion. A special session featuring cutting-edge industrial system developers is also included in the program.

Finally, the keynote speakers, Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarna, Prof. H. V. Jagadish, and Mr. C. N. Ram, representing industry, academia and the user community, provide a broad perspective on the world of databases from diverse angles.

We would like to thank all the members of the COMAD Organizing Committee and the COMAD Program Committee for generously contributing their time and expertise, ensuring a high-quality program of lasting value to the conference attendees. Thanks to Rich Gerber for the START conference tool and to the team at Persistent Systems Private Limited, Pune, for hosting and managing the tool. To ensure wide visibility, these proceedings will be included in the SIGMOD on-line and CD-ROM archives.

We would also like to acknowledge the support extended by Computer Society of India - Pune Chapter, Goa University, IIT Bombay and Persistent Systems Private Limited, Pune in organizing this event.

In closing, we welcome you to the COMAD 2005 conference in Goa and hope that you will find it a technically fruitful and culturally enriching experience.

Anand Deshpande

Jayant Haritsa

Krithi Ramamrithm

T. M. Vijayaraman