Research Strategy

Research Strategy

The core of the database group's research strategy:

• Information Access Disruption
• Distribution and Mobility
• Quality of Service

Information Access Disruption

Data - any, anytime, anywhere and anyhow. In the global information society it has become evident that the value is the data. Applications come and go, but the data remains. It is of importance to make sure that data is reliably stored and is always available, and that it is easy and convenient to search for and use the information, independent on what format and which information is contained there. And independent on how the information is going to be used.

Some keywords: Metadata, semantics, ontologies, historical ontologies, spatial metadata, text mining, clustering of text, web intelligence.

Distribution and Mobility

Peer-to-peer database systems with focus on applying distributed hash tables to make a distributed, replicated, and scalable database system. The idea is to let each node know about a few other nodes, such that each node does not have to handle frequent changes to its view of available nodes. Queries and storage in such a setting is also of great interest. Data may be stored where there is space, and may be moved upon changes in storage capacity. For mobility it is of interest to filter and provide the right information at the right spot and on time.

Some keywords: DHTs, scalable DBMS, feature selection, overlay networks, Location based services.

Quality of Service

Both availability and response time are of interest here. This activity includes aspects of databases like online management, online schema changes and online scaling. An added complexity is how to offer quality of service in a distributed system with autonomy? It is also of great interest to adapt existing database techniques to new hardware.