As Peter points out nobody really knows what science is. Generally speaking, however, I like to distinguish two forms of science.

• Predictive science aims to predict future events based on past observations. It relies on induction. Machine Learning is the embodiment of predictive science.
• Descriptive science aims to describe concisely the universe. Astronomy and biology are descriptive sciences.

The difference between the two is probably a matter of philosophical debate. For example, I can say “the Earth is round” (a description) or “sailing across the sea, you will eventually come back to your starting point” (a prediction). However, the intent is quite different. Gardening and having kids has taught me that the real-world is treacherous. I find it very interesting to describe my kids or my plants, but I am usually quite pessimistic when making predictions about them.

I believe this difference in intent is a fundamental issue in Computer Science. Descriptive people factor in the limitations of their own brain when doing science. They are not after the best system, but rather the best system that they can understand.

Let us play a game. A wizard comes to you and gives you a choice. You can either be handed out the laws of the universe as an algorithm, but in such a form that your brain will be prevented from ever understanding them. Or else, you can be given imperfect laws that you can hope to assimilate within your life time. Which do you pick? If you are a predictive person, you will prefer the perfect laws, at the cost of not understanding them; if you are a descriptive person, you will prefer the laws you can understand, even if they are imperfect.

The 12th International Conference on Extending Database Technology and the 12th International Conference on Database Theory will be held in Saint-Petersburg in March 2009. Papers are due at the end of the Summer. Get busy!

The 25th International Conference on Data Engineering will be held in Shanghai, China in March 2009. ICDE is a generic database conference.

The Second International Workshop on Business Intelligence for the Real-Time Enterprise (BIRTE 08) will be held in conjunction with VLDB’08 in New Zeland. You can see the list of papers accepted at BIRTE 2006 on DBLP.

In today’s competitive and highly dynamic environment, analyzing data to understand how the business is performing, to predict outcomes and trends, and to improve the effectiveness of business processes underlying business operations has become critical. The traditional approach to reporting is not longer adequate, users now demand easy-to-use intelligent platforms and applications capable of analyzing real-time business data to provide insight and actionable information at the right time. The end goal is to improve the enterprise performance by better and timelier decision making, enabled by the availability of up-to-date, high quality information.

The Twelfth International Database Engineering & Applications Symposium (IDEAS 2008) will be held in Münster, Germany.

The Third International Workshop on Flexible Database and Information Systems Technology (FlexDBIST-08) will be held in Turin this year. The scope is defined by this sentence: “Enterprises and organizations need to deal with such heterogeneous and often very large volumes of data, which may also be uncertain, imprecise and incomplete.”

Ladjel Bellatreche is organizing a special issue in New Trends in Physical Data Warehouse Design for the journal of Distributed and Parallel Databases. Submissions are through the journal’s online system. You can read the call for papers on EventSeer.