Hello all XLDB Enthusiasts,

I'm pleased to announce that the final report from the
3rd XLDB workshop has just been published on the xldb3
website. The direct link is:

http://www-conf.slac.stanford.edu/xldb09/xldb09_report.pdf

As in the past, the report will be published in the
CODATA Data Science Journal.

It was a very successful workshop, and I hope we managed
to reflect this in the final report. Thank you all who
contributed to its success!


Let me take this opportunity to give you a quick update
regarding several ongoing xldb related activities...


Next workshop
-------------
As you will see in the report, we are tentatively planning
to organize the next XLDB workshop back in the USA, in
Silicon Valley around September/October of 2010. We will
use this mailing list to kick off the coordination process.


Science challenge
-----------------
Great progress has been made in the area of defining
the science challenge/benchmark. A paper summarizing
this activity will be published in a month or so.
Once it is done, we expect to start broadening the team
working on the benchmark, and start expanding it beyond
arrays.


Use case collection
-------------------
Up until now the usecase collection has been done mostly as
a SciDB activity. Most of the collected use cases revolved
around array data model and they were available exclusively
from scidb.org. We are now planning to broaden this activity,
involve domains with needs other than arrays, and publish
all the use cases on the xldb wiki. In fact, we have already
been promised several new use cases from the science domains
present at the XLDB3, so this effort is well under way already.


International
-------------
The 3rd workshop was very successful in reaching out to our
European colleagues and making them part of the xldb team.
They already formed a strong group, led by Martin Kersten,
and submitted a proposal to EA Commission requesting
funding for activities such as XLDB and SciDB. So, welcome
all the new faces! (we currently have 166 participants on
this mailing list, quite a team already!)


SciDB
-----
As you probably know the SciDB team is planning to have the
first release (alpha) of their software ready in late March
2010. You will hear more exciting news about SciDB shortly,
so stay tuned.

-----------

So, I hope the fact this mailing list has been somewhat
quiet over the past few months didn't make you think we
were inactive! This was partly due to the fact we moved
some discussions about xldb3 workshop logistics to a separate
list with just the xldb3 participants on it.


Let me know if you have any questions.

I'm looking forward to working with you in 2010

Happy Holidays to all of you!

Best regards,
Jacek


--
Jacek Becla
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
[log in to unmask]
+1 650 926 8664