Workshop Organizers' Message

The 1st InternationalWorkshop onBenchmarking of XML and SemanticWebApplications (BenchmarX’09)was held on April 20, 2009 at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia in conjunction with the 14th International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications (DASFAA’09). It was organized by Jiri Dokulil, IrenaMlynkova andMartin Necasky from the Department of Software Engineering of the Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. The main motivation of the workshop was based on the observation that even though XML and semantic data processing is the main topic of many conferences around the world, the communities dealing with XML and semantic data benchmarking and related issues are still scattered. Moreover, although benchmarking is one of the key aspects of improvements of data processing, the majority of researches naturally concentrate on proposing new approaches, while benchmarking is often neglected. Therefore, the aim of BenchmarX was and is to bring the benchmarking research community together and to provide an opportunity to deal with this topic more thoroughly. The program committee of the workshop consisted of 21 researchers and specialists representing 15 universities and institutions from 11 different countries. To ensure high objectiveness of the paper selection process 3 PC chairs from different institutions were selected, in particular Michal Kratky, IrenaMlynkova and Eric Pardede. Each of the submitted papers for BenchmarX’09 was reviewed by 3 PC members for its technical merit, originality, significance, and relevance to the workshop. Finally, the PC chairs decided to accept 40% of the submitted papers. The final program of the workshop consisted of an invited talk and 2 sessions involving the accepted papers. The invitation was kindly accepted by Stephane Bressan from the National University of Singapore, one of the authors of the XOO7 benchmark and an expert in various aspects of data management. Last but not least, let us mention that BenchmarX’09 would not be possible without the support of our sponsors. In particular it was partially supported by the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic, projects of GACR number 201/09/0990 and 201/09/P364. After the successful first year providing many interesting ideas and research problems, we believe that BenchmarX will become a traditional annual meeting opportunity for the whole benchmarking community.