This is an old revision of the document!
Introduction
The primary area of research in the Web and Information Systems laboratory of the the Department of Computer & Decision Engineering concerns information systems (both traditional and on the web). Broadly speaking, we can identify the following major themes in the laboratory's research. The MFE subjects presented below cover these themes.
Business Intelligence and Data Warehouses A data warehouse, an evolution of traditional databases, has become the basis of the new generation enterprise information systems. It contains an aggregated and historical view of the operational information of the entreprise. The laboratory's research focuses on the design of data warehouses using the techniques of conceptual modeling and their implementation into current operational platforms.
The Semantic Web and Web Data Management The Semantic Web, also known as the Web of Linked Data, aims at enabling people to share structured information on the Web. In the same way as one uses
HTML and hyperlinks to publish and connect information on the Web of Documents, one uses the RDF data model and RDF links to publish and connect structured information on the Web of Linked Data. This has the potential to turn the Web into one huge database with structured querying capabilities that vastly exceed the limited keyword search queries so common on the Web of Documents today. Unfortunately, this potential still remains to be realized. In this respect, our work revolves around several issues: (1) the management of ontologies, and especially in the contextualisation, modularization, and the formalization of spatial and temporal aspects in the ontologies; (2) the design of suitable query languages for the web; and (3) the design of efficient evaluation strategies for these query languages.
Spatio-temporal databases Today, the management of data located in space is a necessity both for organizations and individuals. The application domains are numerous: cartography, land management, network utility management (electricity, water, transportation, etc.), environment, geomarketing, location-based services. In addition, the spatial dimension is often related to a temporal or historical dimension, which means that the systems must keep track of the evolution in time of the data contained in the database. Our research consists in defining conceptual models that allows the spatial and temporal aspects of applications to be expressed, and the mechanisms allowing the translation of these specifications into operational systems.
Please note that this list of subjects is not exhaustive. Interested students are invited to propose original subjects.
Master Thesis in Collaboration with Euranova
Our laboratory performs collaborative research with Euranova R&D (http://euranova.eu/). The list of subjects proposed for this year by Euranova can be found here.
These subject include topics on distributed graph processing, processing big data using Map/Reduce, cloud computing, and social networks.