I am a full professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology - Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, where I am heading the database laboratory. I have been in an academic position all along my career. I got my PhD from the university of Paris VI, in 1978, where I first had my master in computer science in 1969. At that time I have been teaching file systems, later turned into teaching database systems. I moved to the university of Burgundy, Dijon, in 1983 to occupy a professor position at the Institute of Technology. I left Dijon for EPFL in 1988.
My first interest was in the area of database programming languages and data modelling, but I moved in 1975 to system architectures for distributed database management. In 1981 I started a project on heterogeneous database architectures (nowadays known as federated databases), which lead me back to modelling aspects. Together with Christine Parent, we developed the ERC+ approach, an entity-relationship model suited for the support of complex objects. Christine Parent and myself have jointly authored many papers on the development of the ERC+ approach and its different aspects. We gave a tutorial on "Advanced Entity-Relationship Databases" at the 1990 Entity-Relationship conference, as well as at the 1990 Conference on Management of Data (New Delhi).Since I joined EPFL, I had the opportunity to develop R&D activities on visual user interfaces, which eventually resulted in the SUPER prototype. This lead us to participate into two European projects (Helios and Swap). I also promoted research on semantic interoperability, including a joint research project (FEMUS) with the Polytechnic in ZŸrich (Prof. Schek, ETHZ). Starting 1995 a new research direction on spatio-temporal data modelling has become the major driving force of my activities. Together with Christine Parent, we turned ERC+ into MADS, a conceptual spatio-temporal data model. MADS has already been used in the design phase for several applications. It has been recently extended to include multi-representation support, thanks to a new European IST project named MurMur.
Presently, my newest interest is on ontologies. We are looking on one hand on extensions to MADS to turn it into an ontology model. On the other hand, we are working on defining what an ontology modularization approach is. These topics are part of our committments in two European-supported activities: the DIP integrated project and the KnowledgeWeb Network of Excellence. Ontologies are also at the core of our contribution to the MICS NCCR centre. We focus here on location-based services.
Other running projects in the lab deal with user interfaces, multimedia databases and various modelling issues (views, schema evolution, data model translation).
I have chaired for six years the Database Reference Model ISO working group, and for five years the distributed database working group within AFCET, the French Computer Society. I was the first chairperson of the steering committee of Entity-Relationship conferences, and still am a member of this committee. Similarly, I have been in charge of the IFIP Visual Database Systems conferences, and am now chairing the IFIP group 2.6 on databases. I have also chaired the Database Group of the Swiss Informatics Society. I am an IEEE Fellow, a founding member of the International Foundation for Cooperative and Interoperable Systems (which runs the COOPIS conferences), and a member of the EDBT (Extending Database Technology) Foundation.I served as member of the program committee for many conferences, including all major database conferences (VLDB, SIGMOD, ER, DE). I was program chairman for the 5th ER conference, the first one to be held in Europe (1986). Since then I have served as Conference Chair and Program Chair for many conferences. My last duty in this respect has been to serve as General Chair for EDBT-ICDT 2010 Joint Conferences, Lausanne, Switzerland, March 22-26, 2010