SIGIR workshop report: the SIGIR heterogeneous and distributed information retrieval workshop

In the last few years there have been the explosion in the use of heterogeneous distributed systems. Ranging from simple Network of Workstations to the more modern and complex Grid systems, the adoption of distributed systems instead of massively parallel supercomputers has been preferred due to their reduced cost of ownership. These kinds of systems pose many challenges in terms of information access, storage and retrieval. Usually, in fact, instead of having collections stored at a single site they are collected, and sometimes managed, at different sites (possibly owned by different institutions). Particular interest has been expressed on architectures and specifications for information retrieval in the context of heterogeneous distributed computing systems.