SEBD 2020 - 28th Italian Symposium on Advanced Database Systems


Preface of the 28th Italian Symposium
on Advanced Database Systems

This volume collects the papers selected for presentation at the twenty-eighth Italian
Symposium on Advanced Database Systems (SEBD 2020), which took place online
as a virtual conference from the 21th to the 24th of June 2020.
   The SEBD Symposium represents the main annual forum for the Italian database
community, where to meet, discuss and exchange experiences among all those, both
in the academy and industry, who are interested in database systems and in all their
broad range of applications. After 16 years from the previous edition in Sardinia,
SEBD 2020 conference was planned to be held in Villasimius (in the southern part of
Sardinia), Italy, at the Tanka Resort, by the crystal-clear sea of Simius beach.
Unfortunately the COVID-19 emergency required exceptional containment measures
for reducing the spread of the virus, and the decision of running the conference online,
on the same days, had to be taken.
   Thanks to the experience from EDBT 2020 virtual conference, reported by its
organizers [1], we were able to make informed decisions on how to run the online
organization of SEBD 2020. After a selection of a dozen of platform, Zoom was
chosen because of its familiarity among the community and the ability of having
face-showing meetings with up to 49 people on the same screen [2]. Given the
peculiar social dimension of SEBD events, we did not use one-way communications
of Zoom Webinars, opting instead for the Zoom Meeting environment, also for the 3
keynotes, tutorial and panel.
   The welcome drink on the first evening was run on a different online platform
called Gather [3], a fun game-like environment on a sea-side conference map
background, where participants can communicate via audio-video calls by just
moving their avatars close to each other. Each day has been divided into 2 Zoom
meeting sessions: one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Even coffee breaks
were included in the conference program, so that attendees had the chance to speak
free using Zoom. We believe that these social moments and live presentations, despite
being held remotely, prevented the risk of perceiving it as a prerecorded videocast and
contributed to the success of the event.
   Thanks to the valuable job of 49 PC members, the scientific program comprised 41
papers that have been accepted for presentation: 8 Research papers, 32 Discussion
papers, 1 Student paper. With only a few exceptions, almost all submissions were
reviewed by 3 anonymous reviewers from the PC, with a median score for accepted
papers of 1,7 out of 3,0 (according to the EasyChair metric).
   As already mentioned, the scientific program also included 3 invited talks by the
internationally renowned scientists Tova Milo, Gerhard Weikum and Carlo Zaniolo,
and a tutorial and panel on Open Science by Emma Lazzeri, Paolo Manghi, Shalini
Kurapati and Stefano Bianco.
   We gratefully acknowledge CC ICT-SUD for its sponsorship and support in the
organization. We wish to thank all the authors who submitted papers and all the
SEBD 2020 - 28th Italian Symposium on Advanced Database Systems


conference participants. We are also grateful to the members of the Program
Committee and the external referees for their thorough work, the invited speaker and
panelists, and all the other people involved in the organization of this “outlier” edition
of SEBD.
   Last, but by no means least, we wish to pay tribute to two colleagues and friends of
ours who departed during the COVID emergency: Florian Daniel and Antonio
Picariello. On April 28th, Florian Daniel died prematurely, at 42, after a brief illness.
Florian was an associate professor at Politecnico di Milano; a brilliant, active and
passionate scholar, a beloved and appreciated teacher, with his irony and acumen he
had won the esteem and recognition of colleagues and students. Antonio Picariello
(aka Picus) was one of the most passionate sustainers of SEBD and passed away just
during the SEBD 2020 conference; for this reason this volume also contains a brief
obituary on him.



June 24, 2020

                                                                       Maristella Agosti
                                                                        Maurizio Atzori
                                                                         Paolo Ciaccia
                                                                          Letizia Tanca




References
1. Angela Bonifati, Giovanna Guerrini, Carsten Lutz, Wim Martens, Lara Mazilu, Norman
   Paton, Marcos Antonio Vaz Salles, Marc H. Scholl, Yongluan Zhou. ​Holding a
   Conference Online and Live, Due to COVID-19​. Communications of the ACM, April 21,
   2020.
2. Zoom Video Communications, Inc. ​Zoom Meeting online platform​ ​https://zoom.us/
3. Gather Presence Inc. ​Gather Town online platform​. ​https://gather.town/