For more than three decades, the BTW conference has served to network scientists from the data management community in Germany and its neighboring countries, as well as  practitioners from industry. Through the mutual exchange on classic core topics of database and information systems technology, but also on current topics such as data science, data protection, the connection with machine learning and highly scalable data processing, database research is constantly being advanced.

Tracks and Topics

At the BTW conference, both classic and emerging questions from the database area and their possible solutions will be discussed. To ease orientation, contributions will be organized  in five tracks. Since many papers will address aspects from several tracks, authors will be able to assign their paper to more than one track. Papers by researchers and practitioners covering  basic research, applied research or applications are equally welcome in all tracks

Database Technologies and Systems.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• Query processing and optimization
• Storage and physical database design
• Indexing, access methods
• Data management on modern hardware
• Transaction processing and concurrency control
• Data warehousing and analytics
• Implementation and architecture of database systems
• Parallel, distributed, and cloud-based data processing
• NoSQL systems (e.g. systems for data streams, web and graph data)
• Performance analysis and benchmarking

Text, Semi-structured Data and IR.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• User aspects of retrieval applications
• System and foundational aspects
• Retrieval models, query processing and ranking, efficiency and scalability
• Machine learning, deep learning and neural models
• Text mining and text analysis
• Natural language processing
• Applications such as web and social media search, professional and domain-specific search
• Evaluation research of retrieval systems, users, and/or applications

Data Engineering, Data Science & Machine Learning.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• Green-IT, sustainability, data ethics, and FAIR data management
• Data analytics, mining, intelligent systems and machine learning
• Data transformation, integration, linkage and interoperability
• Data preparation, cleaning, profiling, and visualization
• Data provenance, versioning, and reasoning
• Data streaming and dataflow engines
• Batch- and ETL-processing systems
• Schema engineering, evolution, and optimization
• Metadata management and recording
• Data processing on modern hardware, distributed systems, and cloud
• Semantic data and knowledge bases
• Benchmarks for data engineering algorithms and workflows

Database Languages & Theory.

All topics of the other tracks are in principle suitable for Databases Languages and Theory, but this track is primarily interested in work focusing  on foundational aspects concerning the principles and theory of data management.

Innovations and Use Cases.

The Innovations and Use Cases track at BTW 2025 invites contributions that showcase the interplay between advanced database technologies and their industrial applications. This track emphasizes papers that

• bridge the gap between foundational database research and the innovative deployment of these technologies.

All topics of the other tracks are suitable for the Innovations and Use Cases track if they have a particular focus on practical use cases. Beyond that we also encourage contributions on the following topics:

• Implementation and architectural advancements of database systems, particularly for distributed and big data solutions.
• Integration and performance optimization of database technologies in the cloud and in “as-a-service” models, with an emphasis on scalability and data management.
• Application of Data Engineering, AI, machine learning methods, and language models within database systems to drive innovation and operational efficiency.
• Exploration of data protection, security measures, and ethical considerations within industrial data systems, ensuring robustness and compliance.

Procedures

BTW 2025 aims to be as attractive as possible for authors and conference participants. For this purpose, we will continue or extend the new measures introduced with previous instances of BTW:

• The review process will include a feedback phase, which allows authors to submit a revision letter. With this letter, they can address questions and criticisms from the reviewers and outline how they plan to revise their contribution to address reviewer comments.
• The scientific program and the industrial program will be merged again at the conference; contributions from industry, application examples and innovative developments are very welcome and can either be assigned to any thematic track or submitted to the innovations track.
• Upon submission, the authors will be asked to choose one or more tracks that best fit their paper.
• The organization team encourages the authors of papers to ensure the repeatability and reproducibility of their experiments and analyses. It is therefore possible to subject accepted contributions to a reproducibility test. Successful contributions are distinguished accordingly in the program and in the proceedings.

Both long papers (original papers or review papers) and short papers (on current projects and ongoing research) can be submitted. Practical contributions are also qualified for both long and short papers. Submissions should be written in English. English is also recommended as the lecture language during the conference.

The contributions must correspond to the layout specifications of the conference proceedings (LNI style, see https://gi.de/service/publikationen/lni). The page limit (not including references) is 20 pages for long papers and 10 pages for short papers. Submissions exceeding the page limit will be rejected without review. The accepted papers will be published in the Lecture Notes in Informatics (LNI) of the GI.

Submissions will be reviewed according to the following criteria:

• Short papers: thematic fit to the conference, degree of innovation, convincing presentation.
• Long articles: as above, as well as a careful evaluation and/or proof.
• Practical contributions: thematic fit to the conference, degree of innovation, convincing presentation, degree of use/impact.

Submissions via https://www.conftool.com/btw2025/ from July 2024 onwards.

Deadlines

Submission deadline for abstracts is September 13, 2024.
Papers are due September 20, 2024.

(11:59 pm, GMT+1)