Interesting KDD-News form SIGMOD’99

The SIGMOD conference organized by the ACM Special Interest Group on Management of Data is one of the major conferences in the database area. Since databases play an important role in knowledge discovery, the SIGMOD conference is also an important forum for researchers in the KDD area, especially with respect to aspects of KDD which deal with very large data sets. At this years SIGMOD conference, topics of interest related to KDD were classical KDD topics: decision trees, association rules, and clustering. The focus of the papers presented at SIGMOD was on the eÆciency for very large data sets (e.g., BOAT { Optimistic Decision Tree Construction) and the e ectiveness and user feedback of the mining process (e.g., OPTICS { Ordering Points to Identify the Clustering Structure or Online Association Rule Mining). It is interesting that { compared to previous years { the number of KDD-related papers (not their quality!) decreased. This is probably an indication that KDD has become an area of its own and that SIGKDD has been accepted by the community as the major conference for KDD related issues!