Information systems research at RWTH Aachen

Abstract

With about 8.000 researchers and 40.000 students, RWTH Aachen is the largest technical university in Europe. The science and engineering departments and their industrial collaborators offer a lot of challenges for database research.The chair Informatik V (Information Systems) focuses on the theoretical analysis, prototypical development, and practical evaluation of meta information systems. Meta information systems, also called repositories, document and coordinate the distributed processes of producing, integrating, operating, and evolving database-intensive applications.Our research approaches these problems from a technological and from an application perspective.On the one hand, we pursue theory and system aspects of the integration of deductive and object-oriented technologies. One outcome of this work is a deductive object manager called ConceptBase which has been developed over the past eight years and is currently used by many research groups and industrial teams throughout the world.On the other hand, a wide range of application-driven projects aims at building a sound basis of empirical knowledge about the demands on meta information systems, and about the quality of proposed solutions. They address application domains as diverse as requirements engineering, telecommunications, cooperative engineering, organization-wide quality management, evolution of chemical production processes, and medical knowledge management. They share the vision of supporting wide-area distributed cooperation not just by low-level interoperation technology but by exploiting conceptual product and process modeling.Under the direction of M. Jarke, Informatik V comprises three research groups with a total of twenty senior researchers and doctoral students: distributed information systems (leader: Dr. Manfred Jeusfeld), process information systems (Dr. Klaus Pohl), and knowledge-based systems (Prof. Wolfgang Nejdl). Database-related activities also exist in the Software Engineering and Applied Mathematics groups.