DB&IR integration: report on the Dagstuhl seminar "ranked XML querying"

This paper is based on a five-day workshop on "Ranked XML Querying" that took place in Schloss Dagstuhl in Germany in March 2008 and was attended by 27 people from three different research communities: database systems (DB), information retrieval (IR), and Web. The seminar title was interpreted in an IR-style "andish" sense (it covered also subsets of (Ranking, XML, Querying), with larger sets being favored) rather than the DB-style strictly conjunctive manner. So in essence, the seminar really addressed the integration of DB and IR technologies with Web 2.0 being an important target area.