Scientific and Statistical Database Management

TheInternationalConferenceonScienti?candStatisticalDatabaseManagement (SSDBM)isanestablishedforumfortheexchangeofthelatestresearchresultson concepts,tools,andtechniquesforscienti?candstatisticaldatabaseapplications. The2008meetingmarkedthe20thtimethatscienti?cdomainexperts,databases researchers, practitioners, and developers came together to share their new - sightsand to discuss ina stimulating environmentfuture researchdirections. This volume contains the proceedings of the 20th SSDBM Conference, held in Hong Kong, China, July 9-11,2008.The conference included 3 keynote talks, 28 long and 7 short papers in 9 sessions, and 8 posters and demonstrations in a single session. Distinguishedmembersofthe communitydeliveredthethree keynotes,which wereabout the past, present, and future managementof scienti?c and statistical data. Alex Szalay,an expert in large-scalescienti?c data management,discussed "New Challenges in Petascale Scienti?c Databases," managing huge scienti?c data repositories, with a focus on particular examples taken from astronomy. Nick Koudas, a leader in semi-structured text management, talked about "- ventures in the Blogosphere," a huge network of textual data (including blogs, social networks, wikis), and BlogScope, a system that collects and analyzes such data. Finally, Per Svensson, a pioneer in database systems development for s- enti?c applications, provided a historical review on "The Evolution of Vertical Database Architectures" from the perspective and performance needs of a s- enti?c or statistical large-scale data analyst user. The Program Committee, consisting of 37 members, accepted 43 papers (28 long,7short,and8posters/demos)fromatotalof84submissions.Thereviewing process was managed by the EasyChair Conference System, an excellent free conference management system, developed by Andrei Voronkov.