Databases, information retrieval and knowledge management: exploring paths and crossing bridges

The International Conference on Information Retrieval and Knowledge Management (CIKM) brings together three avenues of data-oriented research, namely, Database Management, Information Retrieval and Knowledge Management. The confluence of these avenues becomes evident also in the PhD theses of doctoral students: Stream processing makes use of knowledge representation techniques, linked data is emerging as a research topic that bridges information retrieval and knowledge representation, and new forms of querying draw on techniques from both information retrieval and databases. In this paper, we survey new PhD theses at the meeting point of the three research avenues. Our survey is based on the 5th PhD workshop at the ACM CIKM conference. The topics include themes as diverse as link prediction, source code querying, and video stream processing.