ICOODB 2008: trip report

I was invited to speak at ICOODB- the International Conference on Object Databases.
The conference took place on 13 and 14 of March in Berlin. I was there only on the 13.

I have to admit that I was surprised. It was very long time since I attended an Object Database conference in years! They seemed all gone. And now here it is…a surprise. The conference was a great succuess!

23 Speakers, 150 conference attendees from all over the world. Interesting presentation and interesting discussions.

In particular, a lot of discussion took place at the conference about the future direction of object databases. One main question was if new developments should be user driven or standards driven. Not definitely anwers were given.
This discussion was triggered in particular by the keynotes of Mike Card, (who chairs the ODBT group in OMG to advance object database standardization), and by Prof. Kazimierz Subieta (who is very active in the OMG ODBT group).

Mike Card in particular, advocated a more informal way for companies and individual to be involved in the OMG ODBT group, without necessarily taking part to all general OMG technical meetings. He simply asked for their input, and he would be willing to organize informal workshops.
I found this, a very useful suggestion which hopefully may allow more individuals and companies to be involved in the difficult process of finding a suitable object database standards (if any).
Anybody interested in that, should contact Mike Card at Syracuse Research Corporation (SRC).

The conference was perfectly well organized by the team of Stefan Edlich at TFH-Berlin. Stefan deserved the credit to “pull it out”. Jim Paterson played also an important role in helping Stefan with the conference program.

You can find the detailed conference program here

More information on the conference is available at the ICOODB web site