D5: Databases and Information Systems

The age of information explosion poses tremendous challenges regarding the intelligent organization of data and effective search for relevant information in digital libraries, scientific data repositories, and the web. The ultimate long-term goal of the research carried out by the department is to automatically organize information from the Web to provide convenient and precise search capabilities. One area of current focus is the automatic extraction of information and facts from web and text sources using a combination of rules, pattern matching, linguistic analysis, and statistical learning. In this way the department is creating a comprehensive knowledge base that should ideally encompass all important entities and relations from encyclopedic sources, news, and the literature. For effective and efficient search in semi-structured and unstructured data, the department is developing novel methods and software tools for improved querying, ranking, and mining of XML documents, graph-oriented RDF data, and the version history of web archives. For scalability, some of these topics are being pursued in a highly distributed and dynamic peer-to-peer architecture.

The group's work is organized into the following research areas:

• Web and Text Mining
  Coordinator: Srikanta Bedathur
• Ranking and Uncertain Data Management
  Coordinator: Martin Theobald
• Scalable Management of Uncertain Data
  Coordinator: Rainer Gemulla
• Distributed Data and Communities
  Coordinator: Mauro Sozio
• Knowledge Harvesting
  Coordinator: Gerhard Weikum