For over a decade and a half, the COMAD Intl. Conf. on Management of Data, modeled along the lines of ACM SIGMOD, has been the premier international database conference hosted in India. The first COMAD was held in 1989, and it has been held on a nearly annual basis since then (except for a few breaks such as in the years when VLDB and ICDE were held in India). The 11th COMAD was held in January 2005 in Goa. The 12th COMAD will be held in December 2005, in Hyderabad, India. COMAD has always had a significant international participation, with about 30% of the papers being from outside India, including Europe, USA and East/South-East Asia.
COMAD 2005b will focus on new developments in the principles and practices related to data management. The conference will bring together researchers, practitioners, developers and users to present and discuss emerging trends, concepts, techniques, technologies and experiences in data management.
From COMAD 2005b onwards, COMAD has decided to broaden is scope, to include not only traditional database areas, but to add emphasis on Web, Information Retrieval and Data Mining, which all fall under the broad area of data management. Towards this goal, COMAD 2005b has two PC chairs with backgrounds covering these areas, and a programme committee that reflects the expanded scope of COMAD. This pattern will continue in future COMAD offerings.
To ensure wide visibility of material published at the conference, we plan to make arrangements with ACM SIGMOD for including the proceedings of the conference in the SIGMOD on-line and CD-ROM archives. Two awards, for Best Paper and Best Student Paper, will be presented at the conference.
Why COMAD-2005b? COMAD is normally held in December, but in 2004 it got postponed from Dec 2004 to Jan 2005. Thus we never had COMAD 2004, but ended up with 2 COMADs in 2005, one in Jan 2005, which was called COMAD 2005, and the other to be held in Dec 2005. To avoid name confusion, the Dec 2005 edition is called COMAD 2005b.
Note: The submission deadline for early-registrations has been postponed from 15th November 2005 to 15th December 2005.