2018 ACM PODS Alberto O. Mendelzon Test-of-Time Award

Abstract

In 2007, the PODS Executive Committee established a Test-ofTime Award, named after the late Alberto O. Mendelzon, in recognition of his scientific legacy and his service and dedication to the database community. Mendelzon was an international leader in database theory, whose pioneering and fundamental work has inspired and influenced both database theoreticians and practitioners, and continues to be applied in a variety of advanced settings. He served the database community in many ways: he served as both the Program and the General Chair of the PODS conference, and was instrumental in bringing SIGMOD and PODS together. He was an outstanding educator, who guided the research of numerous doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows. The Award is to be given each year to a paper or a small number of papers published in the PODS proceedings ten years prior, that had the most impact (in terms of research, methodology, or transfer of practice) over the intervening decade. The decision was approved by SIGMOD and ACM. The funds for the Award were contributed by IBM Toronto. The PODS Executive Committee has appointed us to serve as the Award Committee for 2018. After careful consideration and having solicited external nominations and advice, we have selected the following paper as the award winner for 2018: “The Chase Revisited" by Alin Deutsch, Alan Nash and Jeff Remmel. Citation. The chase procedure, introduced in the '70s, is a famous technique in the field and has been proved to be important and effective in providing solutions to several problems related to reasoning on data. The paper revisits the standard chase procedure, studying its properties and applicability to classical database problems. Beside settling the open problem of decidability of termination of the standard chase, it investigates the adequacy of the standard chase for a number of data-oriented tasks. The conceptual insight provided by the paper and the technical results presented go much deeper than the modest title of the paper may suggest. They have had a huge impact on the research work carried out in several topics of data management and knowledge bases, including checking query containment under constraints, constraint implication, computing certain answers in data exchange and data integration, query answering in Datalog and its extensions, and ontology-based data access. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Permissions@acm.org. PODS'18, June 10–15, 2018, Houston, TX, USA © 2018 Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. ACM 978-1-4503-4706-8/18/06...$15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3196959.3196993 Session: Test-of-Time Award and Gems of PODS PODS’18, June 10-15, 2018, Houston, TX, USA