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Department » Computer Science » Work Groups » Databases and Information Systems

Databases and Information Systems

Department of Computer Sciences

Address: Takustrasse 9
14195 Berlin
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Office: Heike Eckart
Phone: +49-30-838-75100
Fax: +49-30-838-75109
Mail: eckart@inf.fu-berlinxxx.de
Head: Prof. Dr. Heinz Schweppe
Prof. Dr. Agnès Voisard
The Database and Information Systems Group at Freie Universität Berlin is working on application-oriented  as well as basic research projects. The field of database managment is rapidly changing. Traditional data management tasks are well understood as many application systems today use relational technology. New challenges include unstructured data like text and images and the "information everywhere" paradigm. Data are provided in well structured data bases as well as on the web and more and more in mobile devices.Currently we focus on data management in mobile systems on the one hand and the unstructured-to-structured data area on the other.  In both areas applications like eCommerce clients on PDAs or fact extraction tools for natural language text already exist. However, there are many open research problems which urgently need to be solved in order to improve functionality and performance of such applications.As far as mobile data management is concerned, we focus on transactional guarantees of data related computations in unstable infrastructures. Such kind of guarantees are essential for example in electronic commerce and all kinds of service oriented applications in mobile environments.Our focus in the area of unstructured data has been up to now the extraction of facts from texts. However unstructured data is more than text: Answering queries on the web as an enhancement of retrieval techniques, managing  personal information, finding similarities in large data sets, sentiment analysis and the integration of such techniques into business processes are promising new fields. An inherent and common theme of these areas is impreciseness and uncertainty of data. Sensor data, e.g. captured in mobile environments, may contain errors, web mining will never result in precise information. The same holds for query results in information retrieval or fact extraction. The emerging field of impreciseness of data is a guiding theme of our research. We also work on more technical aspects of data management. The hardware and net infrastructure has changed radically since the advent of tradidtional relational database systems thirty years ago. It is still unclear how the management of very large data sets can benefit from the technoloy shift. We investigate different directions: Column based data management as opposed to the row based relational storage and the utilitzation of  massive parallelisation on commodity hardware guided by the Map-Reduce paradigm. We are in particular interested in improving data management application like time series analysis or business intelligence.

Members of the group are engaged in the Open Street Map (OSM) project. In this context  there are several activities contributing to the project like rendering maps on cell phones or classifying GPS traces in order to detect the street topology.

We collaborate closely with Fraunhofer ISST  in particular on location based services. Dr. Voisard is department head at ISST and adjunct professor  for data base management at our institute.

 

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