The database and information system research group at the University of ULM

Abstract

The University of Ulm was founded in 1967 with focus on medicine and natural sciences. In 1989 the University established two new faculties: Engineering Sciences and Computer Science. This enlargement took place within the framework of the so-called Science City Ulm . In a joint effort, the State of Baden-Württemberg, industrial companies, the University, and the City of Ulm successfully established a research and development infrastructure at or nearby the university campus consisting of the university's research labs, university-related research institutes like the Research Institute for Applied Knowledge Processing (FAW), and industrial research and development labs, especially a large research center of Daimler-Benz AG. Today, the Faculty of Computer Science consists of seven divisions (called 'departments'), each of which equipped with two professor positions: Theoretical Computer Science Artificial Intelligence Distributed Systems Databases and Information Systems Software Technology and Compiler Construction Computer Structures Neural Information Processing. The Dept. of Databases and Information Systems (DBIS) became operational at the beginning of 1990 when Peter Dadam joined the faculty. He came from the IBM Heidelberg Science Center (HDSC) where he managed the research department for Advanced Information Management (AIM). At the HDSC he was working on advanced database technology and applications and contributed to the development of the AIM-P system (see [1]). The second professor position was first occupied by Marc Scholl, who belonged to the DBIS department from 1992 to 1994. In 1996 Wolfgang Klas joined the DBIS department as second professor. He came from the GMD Institute for Integrated Publication and Information Systems (IPSI) where he managed the research division Distributed Multimedia Information Systems and was working on advanced object-oriented database systems technology, interoperable database systems, and multimedia information systems. At present, the DBIS team consists of the teaching and research assistants Thomas Bauer, Susanne Boll, Christian Heinlein, Clemens Hensinger, Erich Müller, Manfred Reichert, Birgit Schultheiβ, the system engineer Rudi Seifert, the secretary Christiane Köppl, and the doctoral students Thomas Beuter and Anita Krämer. In the following, we concentrate on the research and development work performed previously and presently in the research groups of Peter Dadam and of Wolfgang Klas. For references to Marc Scholl's work please visit http://www.informatik.uni-konstanz.de/dbis.