Research

Vision

The department of computer sciences 6 (database systems) researches in all areas related to database systems. In the recent years the focus has been changing from the development of a database system to the basic principles and ideas. The main goal is the provision of an infrastructure for the development of applications especially for keeping data persistently. The main characteristic is the independence of the application and the independence of data structures and data types. This allows on the one hand reusing stored data in new application domains and on the other hand it gives room for internal optimizations without affecting the application. To realize these goals data models, schemata for application independent description of data and query languages to process data are necessary. However, the implementation may be done either inside a database system, or inside a runtime machine (in a container) or inside an operating system.
The keeping of data is just a single approach of the infrastructure. The result of the research, development and application in the last years has made clear that these areas must not be considered independently. A database system has always supported application integration: If several applications use the same data, the applications cooperate. Since the assumption, that data are alway accessed randomly, is not true, the processes and actions become to the fore.
Finally, since in many organisations several databases systems are operated, the coupling of these systems and the development of applications to support this infrastructure become necessary. One solution is data warhousing, where data from several databases are replicated into a single database. This gives rise to new possibilities in processing the data. Another solution is schema integration, a bidirectional function between schemata of several databases to enable two-way changes. The prerequisite is meta modeling supported by repositories.

Main interests

• Ad-hoc-integration of heterogeneous data sources
• weak-consistency in database federations
• database technology in grid-organized systems
• Quality of service parameters in multimedia databases
• Non-functional properties of software components
• Design of multimedia dabase applications
• Contract negotiations in e-commerce systems
• Web Services
• Data Warehousing

More Information

• Groups
  The research groups at inf6
• Projects
  Some current and finished internal projects in the last years
• Cooperations
  Some current and finished projects with external partners (cooperations) in the last years
• Fellowships
  Links to different foundations