Welcome Message from the General Chair

On behalf of the conference committee of VLDB2006, it is my pleasure to welcome you to Seoul for the 32 nd International Conference on Very Large Data Bases.

VLDB is the premier international conference on database technology, organized every year by the VLDB Endowment. Since the first VLDB conference was successfully held in 1975, the VLDB series of conferences has become the leading international forum. Such achievement comes from strong encouragement for submitting creative work, the policy of broadening the topics, and the policy of being strictly international from the very beginning.

This is the first time VLDB is visiting Korea, “The Country of Morning Calm.” Hosting VLDB2006 was a significant undertaking, but also was a very valuable endeavor for our Korean database community. It is our wish that database research in Korea, which has become strong in recent years, be further activated in the coming years through the experience with VLDB2006.

Seoul has been the capital city of Korea for nearly 600 years since the beginning of the last Joseon Dynasty and has many historical relics and tourist resorts. At the same time, it is a modern dynamic metropolis with a population of eleven million and is the center of business, economy, and politics. The conference venue is right at the heart of Southern Seoul, which has been newly developed since 1960's and is one of the key achievements called the “Miracle of Han River.” Han River runs across the center of Seoul westwards to the Yellow Sea.

We acknowledge generous support from our sponsors. Their sponsorship was of critical help in financing VLDB2006. Our sincere thanks go to those 14 sponsors. We also wish to extend our thanks to many organizations that helped our effort. Special thanks go to the VLDB Endowment, Korea Information Science Society (K.I.S.S.), and KAIST.

The conference would not have been a success without help from many people, and our thanks go to all of them: Honorary Chair, Sukho Lee; VLDB Endowment Liaison, Laura Haas; and General Program Chair, Umesh Dayal; Geographical Area Coordinators; National DB Society Liaisons; and members of the program and organization committees. Their names are rightfully acknowledged in the VLDB2006 Conference Committee List and Program Committee List. We also acknowledge contributions of Hongjun Lu, the General PC Chair in Memoriam who, to our utmost sadness, passed away in March Last year. Special thanks are due to the KAIST students who developed the Content Management System and to the Kangwon National University team headed by Jinho Kim who developed the registration system, both using the Odysseus DBMS that has been developed at KAIST for over 16 years. Their efforts helped significantly reduce the complexity of managing proceedings editing and registration. The concept of the content management system had been conceived by Klemens Boehm and first applied to VLDB2005 Trondheim. Special thanks are also due to Yong Chul Oh, the Local Arrangement Chair, who managed all the mundane and complex tasks of local events.

Needless to say, our sincerest thanks go to all the participants of VLDB2006, who are the ones carrying the tradition of unrivalled excellence of the VLDB conferences.

Welcome and enjoy the conference, the city, and dynamic Korea!

Kyu-Young Whang
General Chair, VLDB2006