Once every few years (usually 5 years), a small group of database researchers, practitioners and opinionated professionals get together to assess the state of database research and to recommend problem areas that deserve additional focus. The report written after the workshop represents the consensus on new research areas and describes some of the discussions that took place.

There were a number of earlier reports with similar goals, including: Laguna Beach, California in 1989, Palo Alto, California ("Lagunita") in 1990 and 1995, Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1996, Asilomar, California in 1998 and Lowell, Mass. in 2003.

Continuing this tradition, in late May, 2008, a group of database researchers, architects, users and pundits met at the Claremont Resort in Berkeley, California to discuss the state of the research field and its impacts on practice. Then they release the Claremont Report on Database Research.

Lessons from database research have been applied in academic fields ranging from bioinformatics to next-generation Internet architecture and in industrial uses including Web-based e-commerce and search engines. The core ideas in the field have become increasingly influential. This text provides both students and professionals with a grounding in database research and a technical context for understanding recent innovations in the field. The readings included treat the most important issues in the database area—the basic material for any DBMS professional.

This fourth edition has been substantially updated and revised, with 21 of the 48 papers new to the edition, four of them published for the first time. Many of the sections have been newly organized, and each section includes a new or substantially revised introduction that discusses the context, motivation, and controversies in a particular area, placing it in the broader perspective of database research. Two introductory articles, never before published, provide an organized, current introduction to basic knowledge of the field; one discusses the history of data models and query languages and the other offers an architectural overview of a database system. The remaining articles range from the classical literature on database research to treatments of current hot topics, including a paper on search engine architecture and a paper on application servers, both written expressly for this edition. The result is a collection of papers that are seminal and also accessible to a reader who has a basic familiarity with database systems.

More and more information is being published in form of Web pages. As a result, Web data extraction (how to extract structured data from Web pages) is always a challenging problem in the field of Web data management, and until now, a great number of works have been issued for it.

However, there is few common dataset as the experimental testbed for the works in this field. So it is difficult to compare the performances among the works due to different datasets used by them. For this reason, a large-scale dataset which consists of thousands of Web pages gathered from Completeplanet is provided by us. We contribute this dataset and wish it could be adopted by researchers in this field as a common testbed.

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