1. Observations on DB & IR and Conclusions
business data is boring,
action is in e-science, e-culture, edutainment, etc. ! !
absolute facts is a myth created by accountants,
uncertainty and ambiguity are fact
is wishful thinking ? !
hope for precise semantics based on universally
agreed upon ontologies and perfect metadata 
similarity search with ranking based on
statistical properties of data is the best possible
syntactic approximation to „semantic“ search IR
and can still leverage context information
(metadata where existing, ontological knowledge
if beneficial, multivariate distributions, etc.) DB

2. Killer Queries: Where Google & DBMS Fail
Find gene expression data and regulatory paths related to
Barrett tissue in the esophagus.
What are the most important results in percolation theory?
Are there any theorems isomorphic to my new conjecture?
Find related theorems.
Find information about public subsidies for plumbers.
Find new EU regulations that affect an electrician‘s business.
Where can I download an open source implementation
of the ARIES recovery algorithm? D
DBS
XML
Which professors from D are teaching
DBS and have research projects on XML?
Who was the French woman that I met at the PC meeting
where Peter Gray was PC Chair?

3. + IR Strengths methodologically rich
(statistics & prob., logic, NLP, ...) +
awareness of cognitive models
for end-user intention & behavior
appreciation and experience with ML

4. DB Strengths
ities
(integrity, scalability, availability, manageability, etc.) +
system engineering
resource optimization
(caching, memory mgt., query opt. & exec.,
physical design, scheduling, etc.)

5. DB & IR Marriage Separation was historical accident
(driven by app classes Business vs. Libraries)
From DB guy perspective:
team up with IR, NLP, ML folks
(e.g., merge SIGMOD and SIGIR)
or learn all this yourself
Hypothesis:
similarity-based ranking will become
ubiquitous search paradigm
(with traditional DB queries as a special case)

6. DB & IR: Issues and Non-Issues
exploit collective human input
crawl structured data
use ML & ontologies
for XML IR
simple IR on XML
add flexible ranking to XQuery
polish XQuery &
implement efficiently
use ML to convert Web to XML
homepage.xml schema
extend Google to Deep Web
(DB/DL federations)
break Google monopoly:
collaborative P2P Web search
acquire broader skills (IR/DB/ML/NLP/...):
team up, learn&teach, ... ?