Report on the First International Workshop on Exploratory Search in Databases and the Web (ExploreDB 2014)

The second ExploreDB 2015 workshop intends to bring together researchers and practitioners from different fields, ranging from data management and information retrieval to data visualization and human computer interaction. The workshop program consisted of two keynote talks and six peer-reviewed research papers. The first keynote talk titled 'Explore-By-Example: A New Database Service for Interactive Data Exploration' was given by Prof. Yanlei Diao from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Prof. Diao pointed out that while computing power, memory size, and the ability to collect data are growing exponentially, human ability to understand data remains practically flat. In the second keynote, titled 'Principled Optimization Frameworks for Query Reformulation of Database Queries', Prof. Gautam Das from the University of Texas at Arlington focused on solutions for the many-answers and the empty-answers problems. He proposed to address both problems through ranked retrieval. Xiaoyu Ge, Panos Chrysanthis and Alexandros Labrinidis ('Preferential Diversity') explored how to achieve personalization through preferences on result diversity. Diversity was also the focus in 'Diversifying with Few Regrets, But too Few to Mention' by Zaeem Hussain, Hina Khan and Mohamed Sharaf.