Proceedings of the 2008 ACM 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 P2P systems, the challenges that arise are manifold, ranging from efficient resource discovery to load balancing issues and distributed ranking problems. This 2008 Large Scale Distributed Systems for Information Retrieval Workshop (LSDS-IR08) is a forum for researchers to discuss these problems and to define new directions for the work on distributed information retrieval. This year's program features ten papers on emerging work in the areas of search in structured and unstructured networks, network organization schemes, issues of data quality, search for different data types, result ranking techniques and query routing algorithms. In addition, our keynote, entitled "Search Engine Architectures from Conventional to P2P," will be delivered by Torsten Suel of Polytechnic University in New York.