General description of research

Research at the Database Laboratory (LBD) aims at facilitating and improving the usability of database systems within enterprises or administrations. Since long the laboratory has developed a conceptual design methodology based on a solution combining the advantages of the object-oriented approach and those of the traditional entity-relationship approach. The proposed modeling approach looks nowadays as an extended version of ODMG recommendations. The approach has been implemented as a visual user/DBMS interface layer, which allows users to define and manipulate a database irrespectively of its implementation, whether relational or object-oriented or other. A complementary research on database integration aimed at providing the semantic mechanisms to allow building a federated virtual database from existing heterogeneous databases.

Another major research activity deals with modeling of spatio-temporal data. A conceptual modeling approach for geographic or spatial applications has been defined and validated on test cases from the administration and industry sectors. The modeling approach, known as MADS, has been implemented on some existing Geographic Information Systems. It has since be extended to cover temporal aspects of data and implemented into visual interfaces to an underlying DBMS. We are currently using MADS facilities to define a trajectory modeling approach intended to provide an application-dependent semantic understanding of movement of mobile objects.

Finally, the laboratory has investigated how ontologies can be made available to enterprises using a database approach (this reusing their existing commercial DBMS) while obtaining the same inference services than those offered by current ontology reasoners. The approach is implemented in our OntoMinD prototype.

Laboratory's Mission

The Laboratory has been in charge within EPFL of teaching and research activities dealing with information and database systems, as seen from the computer science perspective. This has included:

• responsibility for courses on database and information systems topics within the computer science curriculum as within other curricula
• responsibility for promoting continued education courses on database and information systems topics as well as relevant general public activities like seminars and conferences
• responsibility for assisting other EPFL research groups involved in application specific R&D projects where database and information systems technology is used
• responsibility for promoting cooperation with industrial and administration partners to assist them in their database and information systems R & D projects
• to contribute to promote EPFL's image all over the world.