The idea of creating the MMIS group came into being just after the completion of the MOSS and VORTEL projects at the end of the year 1996. The father of the group was Prof. Meyer-Wegener. He founded it together with Christoph Baumgarten, Ulrich Marder and Günter Robbert in the Database Group of the Institute for System Architecture at the Department of Computer Science of the Dresden University of Technology.
At the beginning, it was just a local reading group, that met regularly to discuss recent developments, new literature, the evolution of multimedia information systems, and some other issues connected with this subject.
If Prof. Meyer-Wegener's handwritten notes can be trusted, the very first meeting took place on May 15, 1997. From then on, the group met almost every week until March 19, 1998. Then two of the members moved to other universities (namely, Ulrich Marder moved to the University of Kaiserslautern at the beginning of 1998, and Günter Robbert moved to the University of Bamberg in March 1998).
However, none of the former members was willing to cease to meet, so the founders decided to continue the activity, but of course not as often as before, and at the inter-university level. Thus the MMIS Group split into the (distributed) MMIS Group and the "local MMIS Group", now named MISAG. The meetings of the MMIS group were scheduled twice a year and have been called MMIS Workshops since then. The first MMIS Workshop took place on September 30th, 1998 at the University of Kaiserslautern.
The group has evolved moderately, usually broadening its membership and the issues. In 1997 and 1998, members from two other scientific institutions - Fraunhofer Gesellschaft (formerly GMD) Darmstadt and University of Rostock - joined in.
In autumn 2001, the two professors in the group both changed universities: Prof. Meyer-Wegener moved to the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, and Prof. Henrich with his whole group moved to the University of Bayreuth. Due to the overhead involved in that, there was no autumn MMIS workshop in 2001. However, the change has triggered another extension of the group - it gathered new members and evolved into a real inter-university group.
And now, a new, very promising era for the MMIS group has begun ...
| Created on 08.03.2002 by Maciej Suchomski. |
| Last modified on 13.03.2002 by Klaus Meyer-Wegener. |