Mission

The mission of the Databases and Distributed Systems Group is to develop new solutions for the integrated management of data, information and knowledge in highly distributed environments.

Research Areas

Pervasive and Event-driven Computing

The platforms of tomorrow will be highly decentralized and distributed over a multitude of different devices that can be dynamically networked and will interact in an event-driven mode. This requires a new generation of middleware and components that can function and exchange data and information in this highly dynamic environment. We mainly focus on Pervasive Computing, Ambient Intelligence, Grid Computing and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN).
Details on this research topic can be found here.

Publish/Subscribe

Messaging systems have proven to be an important building block in modern computing systems — they facilitate the paradigm shift from centralized applications and data stores towards data-driven systems that comprise autonomously operating components and services. We concentrate on publish/subscribe services as a special case of message-oriented middleware (MOM) where data producers (publishers) publish notifications to inform about situations (events) they have observed. Consumers (subscribers) express their interests by issuing a subscription. Publishers and Subscribers share a mediator (known as Notification Service) that is responsible for dealing with crucial issues like scalability, reliability, transaction support, visibility of notifications, expressivity of subscriptions, semantic data exchange, etc.
Projects and publications related to this area can be found here.

Peer-to-Peer

The peer-to-peer paradigm has proved itself as a powerful approach for large-scale distributed systems. The construction of reliable and high-performance overlay networks is a young but fast moving research area. Our research focuses on the efficient management of data in and the quality of service in highly-dynamic and public peer-to-peer networks.
Details on this research topic can be found here.

Performance Engineering

Modern E-Business applications are typically based on highly distributed, multi-tiered architectures comprising multiple components deployed in a heterogeneous environment. The inherent complexity of the latter makes it extremely difficult for system developers to estimate the size and capacity of the deployment environment needed to guarantee that Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are met.
For details on research projects in this topic click here.

Platforms for Digital Interactions

Electronic commerce is one of the main driving forces behind today's explosive growth of distributed computing and information management. The requirements of this kind of applications pose new challenges for the management of data, information and knowledge, as well as the underlying platforms for distributed computing. We focus on platforms and standards that make the digital interaction possible, such as, Enterprise Service Bus, Business-to-Business (B2B), RFID, EPCglobal, Web Services, BPEL, just to name a few.
Further information about our research topics within this area can be found here.