Overview of ICDT conferences

ICDT proceedings and special issues

The proceedings of ICDT have been published at Dagstuhl's Leipzig International Proceedings in Informatics series since 2015. 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. From 2009 (when the  collaboration with EDBT began) until 2013, the proceedings appeared in the ACM Digital Library, in the ACM International Conference Proceedings Series. Access is free, but requires a free ACM Web Account. The 2014 proceedings were published at openproceedings.org, an open publication platform jointly started by EDBT and ICDT. Moreover, the proceedings since 2009 can be freely accessed directly on openproceedings.org from the above table.

ICDT special journal issues appear in Logical Methods in Computer Science since 2020. Until 2005, special issues special issues on ICDT appeared in the journal Theoretical Computer Science. From 2007 until 2019, 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.  Please note that the selected papers of ICDT 2012 and ICDT 2013 appeared in the same issue, ToCS 57(4). 

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, then by Jan Van den Bussche, Thomas Schwentick, and Wim Martens. The current chair is Dan Olteanu. The Council is currently composed as follows: Ke Yi, Floris Geerts, Graham Cormode, Balder ten Cate, George Fletcher, Wim Martens, Jan Van den Bussche, and Dan Olteanu.  

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.