International Workshop on
Inconsistency and Incompleteness in Databases (IIDB)

Database textbooks generally explain that integrity constraints should be satisfied at all times because they capture the set of all legal databases. Nevertheless, data inconsistency is a phenomenon that often occurs in practice. The most common reason for inconsistency is the need to integrate distributed, independent data sources: different databases that are consistent by themselves can contain conflicting tuples. The conflicts are revealed only when the tuples are brought together in an integrated database. In such situations, it is of practical importance to know how to deal with violations of integrity constraints. In general, there is no single best way to restore consistency, leaving us with a multitude of possible repairs. Even when we do not know the right repair, we can still try to prevent query answers from containing incorrect tuples. This idea is known as consistent query answering (CQA).

A similar concept arises in the context of incomplete databases: when an incompletely specified database can be completed in more than one way, we may want to restrict query answers to contain only the tuples that are in the query answer in each possible completion. Incomplete databases can arise, for example, when the data exchange rules between a source and a target database only partially determine the target. Also, an incomplete database may play a role similar to a set of repairs, representing different ways of solving existing data conflicts.

Another related area is that of uncertainty handling, where numeric probability factors are associated with data. Such data represent observations and arise in sensor networks or distributed databases. For example, the position of a moving object can only be ascertained with some degree of probability.

Recently, there has been a surge of interest in the areas of inconsistent, incomplete, and probabilistic databases, partly driven by the demands of data integration and sensor database applications. The goal of this EDBT Workshop is to bring together database researchers working on inconsistency, incompleteness, and uncertainty to review recent progress and outline future research directions. The focus of the workshop will be primarily on semantic and computational issues arising in the representation and querying of inconsistent, incomplete, and uncertain databases.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• database repairing
• consistent query answering
• conflicts in data integration
• logical approaches to inconsistency
• data exchange
• representing and querying incomplete information
• Open/Closed World Assumption
• epistemic/modal logic frameworks
• uncertainty in databases
• probabilistic databases
• fuzzy databases
• error-tolerant agents
• exceptions
• argumentation-based frameworks

All accepted papers will be included in the informal proceedings to be distributed at the workshop. Papers may be accepted for full presentation at the workshop and publication in the proceedings, or for a short/poster presentation and publication of a 3-page abstract.

As with the previous edition of EDBT, post-proceedings of EDBT workshops will be published by Springer-Verlag in the series Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Regular papers (full presentation) will be considered for inclusion in the formal proceedings.

Paper Submission Deadline:	December 22, 2005
Notification of Acceptance:	January 25, 2006
Camera Ready Copy Due:	February 22, 2006
Workshop:	March 26, 2006

• Jan Chomicki, University at Buffalo, USA
• Jef Wijsen, University of Mons-Hainaut, BEL

• Marcelo Arenas, PUC Chile, CHL
• Ofer Arieli, Academic College of Tel-Aviv, ISR
• Leopoldo Bertossi, Carleton University, CAN
• Patrick Bosc, IRISA/ENSSAT, FRA
• Andrea Calì, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, ITA
• Nilesh Dalvi, University of Washington, USA
• Thomas Eiter, Vienna University of Technology, AUT
• Wenfei Fan, University of Edinburgh, UK & Bell Labs, USA
• Enrico Franconi, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, ITA
• Ariel Fuxman , University of Toronto, CAN
• Gösta Grahne, Concordia University, CAN
• Sergio Greco, University of Calabria, ITA
• Maurizio Lenzerini, University of Rome "La Sapienza", ITA
• Jerzy Marcinkowski, Wroclaw University, POL
• V.S. Subrahmanian, University of Maryland, USA