The symposium provides an international forum for discussion of the problems of engineering database systems involving not only database technology but the related areas of information retrieval, multimedia, human machine interface and communication. The goal of IDEAS is to foster closer interaction among the industrial, research and user communities and provides an excellent opportunity for them to meet, discuss ideas, examine the current ones and develop new solutions and research directions. Along with the technical sessions, the symposium also features prominent invited speakers.

IDEAS series of symposiums are scheduled annually and have been held since 1997 in North America, Europe and Asia. It has attracted participants from governmental and non-governmental agencies, industries, and academia to exchange ideas and share experiences. IDEAS2003 will take place in Hong Kong, which is one of the great cities of the world. The city has sharp contrasts-towering skyscrapers, emerald-green mountains, bustling streets, and sandy beaches. The city has an international reputation as the "pearl of the orient," where people, cultures and cuisine from around the world can be found, and enjoyed.

IDEAS2003 invites quality papers describing original ideas and new findings on applied technological and theoretical aspects of database engineering and applications. In particular we welcome submissions describing work on integrating new technologies into products and applications, on experiences with existing and novel techniques, and on the identification of unsolved challenges. We consider this symposium to be a unique and important forum to discuss experiences in applying databases to actual situations. You are invited to submit original technical papers in English reporting recent results in database and related fields.  Both research papers and experience and application papers are welcome.  While research papers should report original research work, experience and application papers should describe the development and operations of challenging database related systems and applications.

Full length papers and short papers are invited: the topics of interest within the scope of the conference include, but are not restricted to:

Access Methods and Data Structures
Active Databases
Authorization and Database Security
BioInformatics and its applications
Concurrency Control and Recovery
Constraint Management
DBMS Architectures
Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery
Data Models
Data Visualization
Data Warehousing
Database and Agent Technology
Database Applications
Database Performance
Database Design and UML
Database Evolution and Migration
Database Languages
Database Security and Confidentiality
Databases and Electronic Commerce
Databases and Soft Computing
Distributed and Parallel Databases
Extensible Database Systems
Genomic Databases
Information Integration
Interoperability and Cooperative Systems
Internet/Intranet Services and Databases
Knowledge Base Management Systems
Legacy Databases
Logic and Databases
Mobile Computing and Database
Multimedia Database Systems
Optimization and Performance
Query Processing, Optimisation and Approximation
Real-Time Database Systems
Data Replication and Caching
Scientific and Statistical Databases
Semi-structured Databases and XML
Spatial and Temporal Databases
Stream database
Tertiary Storage for Databases
Digital Libraries and Text Databases
User and Application Interfaces
View Management
Workflow Systems and Databases
Web and Databases
Web services
XML and semantics