Trending topics in VLDB, via key words in the titles of publications from 2000 to 2012. I did a quick and dirty job of removing stop words and stemming. If you want, you can also download the sqlite database with all of the data.
Thanks to @samrmadden for the 2000 - 2011 titles.
Thees trends are based on the most popular keywords across all years of VLDB publications
Topics such as efficiency, large, indexing, and optimization have been increasing in popularity in the past few years.
What keywords have not been doing as well? We've all heard about how XML is dead, and it certainly is by paper count measures. However so are traditionally database topics such as management, information, and relational. Also, it seems that technology and xml, are taking a downturn, as is relational -- is this the turning point for NoSQL? Strange to see OLAP slowing down, given the popularity of large data these days.
Let's now look at keywords that have burst into the scene in the past few years. These keywords are selected by computing the ratio of "the average number of times a keyword is used since 2009" by "the average before 2009".
It makes sense that words like mapreduce, social, and cloud have made a splash, but I was suprised that graphs and subgraphs have been consistently increasing in popularity in the past half a decade. As machine learning becomes more and more integrated into databases probabilistic approaches have been gaining lots of traction. Similarly, probabilistic approaches to consesus and failures distributed settings are promising. As always, being fast is what makes the big bucks.
Finally it's nice to see that crowdsourcing has finally come to the VLDB community
It's good to see that data, query and databases are never far from our minds.
| 2012 | |
| querying | 23 |
| databases | 19 |
| data | 17 |
| based | 14 |
| efficient | 12 |
| optimization | 12 |
| graphs | 10 |
| mapreduce | 9 |
| indexing | 8 |
| large | 7 |
| 2011 | |
| data | 40 |
| querying | 29 |
| databases | 18 |
| systems | 16 |
| based | 15 |
| web | 14 |
| efficient | 13 |
| graphs | 13 |
| processing | 10 |
| large | 9 |
| 2010 | |
| querying | 31 |
| data | 30 |
| databases | 26 |
| searching | 17 |
| processing | 15 |
| based | 14 |
| efficient | 11 |
| streaming | 11 |
| graphs | 10 |
| indexing | 10 |
| 2009 | |
| data | 27 |
| querying | 19 |
| databases | 18 |
| web | 15 |
| efficient | 13 |
| based | 10 |
| networks | 10 |
| streaming | 10 |
| graphs | 8 |
| indexing | 8 |
| 2008 | |
| data | 44 |
| querying | 35 |
| databases | 19 |
| systems | 17 |
| searching | 16 |
| efficient | 15 |
| processing | 12 |
| web | 12 |
| xml | 11 |
| based | 10 |
| 2007 | |
| data | 41 |
| querying | 33 |
| databases | 16 |
| efficient | 16 |
| systems | 15 |
| processing | 10 |
| searching | 10 |
| streaming | 10 |
| indexing | 9 |
| management | 9 |
| 2006 | |
| querying | 35 |
| data | 26 |
| databases | 16 |
| efficient | 15 |
| xml | 14 |
| optimization | 11 |
| systems | 11 |
| indexing | 10 |
| processing | 10 |
| based | 9 |
| 2005 | |
| querying | 37 |
| data | 25 |
| databases | 24 |
| xml | 21 |
| efficient | 18 |
| systems | 18 |
| based | 14 |
| streaming | 12 |
| patterns | 10 |
| management | 8 |
| 2004 | |
| data | 40 |
| querying | 31 |
| databases | 30 |
| systems | 20 |
| streaming | 19 |
| xml | 17 |
| based | 14 |
| management | 14 |
| processing | 10 |
| relational | 9 |
| 2003 | |
| data | 43 |
| querying | 29 |
| xml | 21 |
| databases | 16 |
| based | 13 |
| streaming | 13 |
| web | 13 |
| systems | 10 |
| processing | 9 |
| storage | 9 |
| 2002 | |
| data | 31 |
| databases | 19 |
| systems | 14 |
| xml | 12 |
| querying | 11 |
| web | 11 |
| searching | 9 |
| services | 7 |
| streaming | 7 |
| structure | 7 |
| 2001 | |
| data | 29 |
| querying | 19 |
| web | 16 |
| databases | 15 |
| xml | 15 |
| systems | 12 |
| processing | 10 |
| management | 8 |
| cache | 7 |
| indexing | 7 |
| 2000 | |
| data | 21 |
| databases | 19 |
| querying | 15 |
| information | 9 |
| web | 9 |
| based | 6 |
| integration | 6 |
| mining | 6 |
| systems | 6 |
| application | 5 |
| 1999 | |
| data | 15 |
| databases | 12 |
| querying | 12 |
| systems | 8 |
| indexing | 7 |
| optimization | 7 |
| architecture | 5 |
| high | 5 |
| implementing | 5 |
| web | 5 |
| 1998 | |
| databases | 20 |
| data | 16 |
| querying | 10 |
| mining | 8 |
| based | 7 |
| algorithms | 6 |
| optimization | 6 |
| joins | 5 |
| large | 5 |
| performance | 5 |