Workshop on large-scale distributed systems for information retrieval

Due to the dramatically increasing amount of available data, effective and scalable solutions for data organization and search are essential. Distributed solutions naturally provide promising alternatives to standard centralized approaches. With the computational power of thousands or millions of computers in clusters or peer-to-peer systems, the challenges that arise are manifold, ranging from efficient resource discovery to issues in load balancing and distributed query processing. The 2008 edition of the Workshop on Large-Scale Distributed Systems for Information Retrieval (LSDS-IR'08) provided a forum for researchers to discuss these problems and to define new directions for the work on Distributed Information Retrieval. The Workshop program featured research contributions in the areas of similarity search, resource selection, network organization schemes, issues of data quality, result ranking techniques and query routing algorithms.