In 2013, the International Conference on Database Theory (ICDT) began awarding the ICDT test-of-time (ToT) award, with the goal of recognizing one paper, or a small number of papers, presented at ICDT a decade earlier that have best met the “test of time”. In 2020, the award recognizes a paper from the ICDT 2010 proceedings that has had the most impact in terms of research, methodology, conceptual contribution, or transfer to practice over the past decade. The award was presented during the EDBT/ICDT 2020 Joint Conference, March 30-April 2, 2020, in Copenhagen, Denmark.
The ICDT 2020 Test of Time Award committee consists of:
After careful consideration and soliciting external assessments, the committee has chosen the following recipient of the 2020 ICDT Test of Time Award:
Foundations of SPARQL query optimization
by Michael Schmidt, Michael Meier, Georg Lausen.
This paper is one of the stepping stones that placed Semantic Web query languages on the radar of Database Theory. The paper focuses on SPARQL, the standard language for querying the graph-based model underlying Semantic Web data. It presents an elegant complexity analysis of SPARQL pinpointing the impact of every single operator of the language. It also derives an impressive set of optimization rules highlighting the similarities as well as the important differences between SPARQL and more classical languages such as relational algebra and SQL.
The paper has had a substantial impact counting more than 300 citations. It has influenced the theoretical development of SPARQL and its extensions, the design and construction of Benchmarks for comparing implementations, and also the now ubiquitous research on knowledge-graph data and queries.