BTW (conference)

The conference on Database Systems for Business, Technology and Web (BTW) is the conference of the German Informatics Society's (GI) special interest group on databases and information systems (DBIS).

With a solid acceptance rate of 15% to 40% the conference has been ranked in the international CORE ranking as it is seen competitive to A-ranked conferences although the BTW focuses on senior professors from Germany, Austrian and Swiss universities serving as chairs.

Structure and history
The biennial BTW conference series started in 1985 in Karlsruhe with 320 participants. Since then it has been held every two years at German and Swiss universities. It can be seen as the GI's counterpart to the ACM SIGMOD and CIKM conferences. Although it is an international conference with English as the conference language, it is mainly aimed at German-speaking groups and is considered to be the most important conference in the field of database systems in the German-speaking area.

The conference itself consists of a research and industrial programme including presentations or demonstrations of the papers published in the conference proceedings. At the conference, the DBIS group awards several prizes, including the prize for the best dissertation in Database and Information Systems and the prizes for the best papers. Several workshops will be held in conjunction with the conference.