[Newsletter PoDM ] Principles of Data Management, Newsletter 62, July 2026

Thu Jul 2 18:19:11 UTC 2026

Principles of Data Management, Newsletter 62, July 2026
The newsletter on Principles of Data Management from databasetheory.org

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Call for Papers: ICDT 2027
Call for Participation: Foundations of Data Management Workshop
DB Theory Success: 2026 Alonzo Church Award 

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ICDT 2027: 30th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON DATABASE THEORY
Lille, France, 6-8 April 2027.

CALL FOR PAPERS - SUBMISSION ROUND 2

ICDT is a series of international scientific conferences on research of
data management theory (https://databasetheory.org/icdt-pages). Since 2009,
it is annually and jointly held with EDBT (Extending DB Technology).

The 30th edition of ICDT, in 2027, is planned to take place in Lille,
France from 6-8 April 2027.

* Topics of Interest 

  We welcome research papers on every topic related to the principles and
  theory of data management, provided that there is a clear connection to
  foundational aspects. This includes, for example, articles on "classical"
  data management topics such as the following.

  - The theoretical investigation of various aspects underlying data
    management systems (e.g., Indexes, Concurrency and recovery,
    Distributed and parallel databases, Cloud computing, Privacy and
    security, Graph databases, Data streams and sketching, Data-centric
    (business) process management and workflows, Data and knowledge
    integration and exchange, Data provenance, Views, Data warehouses,
    Domain-specific databases - multimedia, scientific, spatial, temporal,
    text data, ...).

  - The design and study of data models and query languages.

  - The development and analysis of algorithms for data management.

  This also includes papers exploring existing or identifying new
  connections between data management and other areas, such as the areas
  of: knowledge representation, semantic web, web services, information
  retrieval and data mining, machine learning and artificial intelligence,
  distributed computing, and theoretical computer science.

  In all of the above, a clear emphasis on foundational aspects is
  expected. You may want to check https://dblp.org/db/conf/icdt/index.html
  to get an overview of previous editions of ICDT.

  The Program Committee reserves the right to desk reject a submission when
  it is regarded to be out of scope.

* Submission Cycles and Dates

  ICDT has two submission cycles for 2027. The upcoming second submission
  cycle has deadlines as follows.

  # ICDT Submission Cycle 2
    - September 3, 2026:: Abstract submission
    - September 10, 2026: Paper submission
    - December 1, 2026: Notification

  Papers rejected in the first submission cycle cannot be submitted to the
  second submission cycle unless explicitly requested by the reviewers.

* Tracks

  1. Regular Research Papers (15 pages, anonymized)

  The results must be unpublished and not submitted for publication
  elsewhere, including the proceedings of other symposia or
  workshops. Papers must be at most 15 pages, excluding
  references. Additional details may be included in a clearly marked
  appendix, which, however, will be read at the discretion of the program
  committee (online appendices are not allowed). Papers not conforming to
  these requirements may be rejected without further consideration.

  2. Database Theory in Action (4 pages, non-anonymized)

  The "Database Theory in Action" track calls for short papers that illustrate
  the value and impact of database theory through its application to other
  domains, or to real-world problems. In particular, papers submitted to this
  track do not need to include novel theoretical contributions. We specifically
  invite papers that demonstrate novel and important connections between
  database theory and neighboring communities, such as Database Systems,
  Operating Systems, Programming Languages, Machine Learning, Artificial
  Intelligence, Knowledge Representation, Distributed Computing, and Industry,
  as well as other scientific disciplines outside of Computer Science.  At the
  discretion of the program committee, there may be invited papers to this track
  as well.

  Papers submitted to this track must be 4 pages + references, and can be based
  on a previously published paper at another venue.  The title of the papers
  submitted to this track must start with "Database Theory in Action:". These
  papers should also include clear pointers to all relevant previous
  publications, websites, tools, repositories, etc.

* Proceedings 

  The conference proceedings will appear in the Leibniz International
  Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs) series, based at Schloss
  Dagstuhl. 

* Detailed submission instructions

  Please see the full call for papers, available at
  https://edbticdt2027.github.io/?contents=ICDT_CFP.html for the detailed program
  committee as well as detailed submission instructions, including the online 
  submission platform, the anonymity requirement, the conflict-of-interest
  policy, and participation requirement.

  Note that a paragraph explaining author responsibilities and expectations
  w.r.t. responsible use of AI has been added to the detailed CFP since round 1.

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Foundations of Data Management Workshop

Location: Zurich
Time: July 27 - 30, 2026
Program: https://www.ifi.uzh.ch/en/dast/events/FDM26-Workshop.html

While the workshop will be primarily in person, it will also accommodate online attendance. Researchers interested to attend the talks online should reach out to Dan Olteanu (mailto:olteanu at ifi.uzh.ch). 
They will receive an email with the zoom link a few days before the start of the workshop. The talks will not be recorded.

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2026 ALONZO CHURCH AWARD GOES TO DB THEORETICIANS

* The 2026 Alonzo Church Award for Outstanding Contributions to 
  Logic and Computation is presented to

  Pablo Barceló, Leonid Libkin, Wim Martens, Juan Reutter, 
  Miguel Romero, Moshe Vardi and Domagoj Vrgoč

  for laying foundations of logical languages for querying property 
  graphs that found adoption in the SQL and GQL international standards 
  within a decade

* Papers:

  1. Leonid Libkin, Wim Martens, Domagoj Vrgoc, Querying Graphs with Data, 
     Journal of the ACM, Volume 63, Issue 2, pages 1–53, 2016.

  2. Juan Reutter, Miguel Romero, Moshe Vardi, Regular Queries on Graph 
     Databases, Theory of Computing Systems, Volume 61, Issue 1, pages 31–83, 2017.

  3. Pablo Barcelo, Leonid Libkin, Juan Reutter, Querying Regular Graph 
     Patterns, Journal of the ACM, Volume 61, Issue 1, pages 1–54, 2014.

* Graph databases have risen to a high level of prominence and will play an 
  ever increasing role in data processing tasks. Implemented by industry giants 
  (Oracle, Amazon, Google, SAP, Neo4j), they led to two new ISO standards. One 
  is an extension of the SQL standard called SQL/PGQ enabling SQL to query 
  property graphs. The other is a native graph query language called GQL: the 
  only query language standardized by ISO after SQL. Unlike SQL, whose core is 
  first-order logic, SQL/PGQ and GQL developed in an almost theoretical vacuum. 
  The standard committee looked in the scientific literature for results to 
  guide them, and identified 4 key influences. Two, dating back to the 1980-90s, 
  are about the ubiquitous regular path queries, which fall short of the needs 
  of modern query languages. For this, two key new additions were needed: 
  querying graph topology and data at the same time, and querying complex paths 
  of arbitrary length. These were provided by papers 1 and 2, and their key 
  constructs were incorporated into the new standards. Conference versions of 
  these papers, included in the 4 key influences, received test-of-time awards, 
  acknowledging their role in providing theoretical foundations for new 
  industrial query languages. The third paper addresses a key challenge of 
  compositionality in graph languages. Its main contribution is a compact 
  representation of query results as automata, effectively transforming them 
  into new graph databases. The paper gained significant interest among industry 
  players interested in expanding GQL with graph-to-graph queries, and was 
  recognized by two major awards for the doctoral thesis that formed its basis.
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