Description: The Infolab belongs to the Chair of Computer Science (held by Prof. Mike Papazoglou), and is part of the Department of Information Management at Tilburg University.
Due to market pressure, new organizational forms built around business processes and inter-organizational relationships are emerging. Cross function, cross business unit, and cross company availability of information is the cornerstone of a modern organization. These developments result in an ever-increasing demand for globalization in addition to unified access to information resources which are distributed throughout a local or worldwide network. Access to these resources is currently hampered by the presence of proprietary or legacy systems, poor design of business processes, and the rapid expansion of information networks that include a wide range of information and users with a variety of requirements.
The focus of the Infolab concentrates on the long-term objective of supporting the design and development of state-of-the-art IT tools which are able to access, synthesize, and reason about large volumes of distributed information. Our work is interdisciplinary and is based on results of currently disjoint research fields, in particular data and knowledge representation and modeling, requirements engineering, distributed and interoperable data bases, client/server systems, and Internet technologies. These objectives are achieved through strategic research, advanced prototyping, technology transfer, and collaborative product development with industry and government agencies and by presentation of our results to the wider scientific community.
Researchers associated with the project: Dr. Wilhelm Hasselbring, Dr. Manfred Jeusfeld, Prof. Dr. Michael P. Papazoglou, Dr. Hans Weigand
Brief CVs of Key Researchers:
Name: Dr. Wilhelm Hasselbring
Nationality: German
Email:hasselbring@kub.nl
Home page:http://infolab.kub.nl/people/willi
Academic Qualifications & Experience: Wilhelm Hasselbring received his Diploma in Computer Science from the Technical University of Braunschweig in 1989; Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Dortmund in 1994. From 1989 to 1993 he has been researcher in Software Engineering at the University of Essen. In 1993 he joined the Department of Computer Science at the University of Dortmund as University assistant (C1). Since 1998 he is Assistant Professor at the INFOLAB, Tilburg University. In between, he visited Trinity College, Dublin, the University of Edinburgh, Department of Artificial Intelligence and Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC). He is a member of ACM, IEEE Computer Society, GI (German Association for Computer Science), and GMDS (German Association for Medical Informatics).
His main research interests include software engineering for parallel and distributed systems, in particular requirements analysis and traceability, formal specification, prototyping, software architectures for heterogeneous information systems, and hospital information systems.
Name: Dr. Manfred Jeusfeld
Nationality: German
Email:jeusfeld@kub.nl
Home page:http://infolab.kub.nl/people/jeusfeld
Academic Qualifications & Experience: Manfred Jeusfeld studied computer science from 1980 to 1986 at the Technical University of Aachen (RWTH), Germany. After getting his Diploma degree, he moved to University of Passau, Germany, to join the institute of Prof. Matthias Jarke. He worked on development support for database applications and on foundations of deductive & object-oriented databases. In 1992 he received his Doctoral degree in Natural Sciences from the University of Passau.
In 1992 he returned to the RWTH Aachen as a senior researcher. He led several research projects projects in the areas of distributed cooperative information systems, meta modelling techniques and medical terminology. He has been the principal developer of the ConceptBase system which is now used by about 200 institutes and companies world-wide for designing information systems.
In 1995, he spend one year as a visiting assistant professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Department of Information & Systems Management. There, he worked on interoperable decision support systems and information architectures for electronic shops.
Since 1997, he is assistant professor at the faculty of economics of the Tilburg University, The Netherlands. His research covers cooperative conceptual modeling, data warehouse quality management, electronic commerce repository systems, and information models for information exchange between engineers.
Dr. Jeusfeld has published more than 10 journal articles (Information Systems, Decision Support Systems, etc) and numerous conference articles. He is or has been reviewer for international journals like Transactions on Informations Systems and conferences including ICIS, VLDB, CAiSE, ER and others.
Name: Prof. Dr. Michael P. Papazoglou
Nationality: Greek and Australian
Email:mikep@kub.nl
Home page:http://infolab.kub.nl/people/mikep
Academic Qualifications & Experience: Michael P. Papazoglou is a full Professor and director of the Infolab at the Univ. of Tilburg in the Netherlands. Prior to this he held the positions of full Professor and head of School of Information Systems at the Queensland Univ. of Technology (QUT) in Brisbane Australia (1991-1996); Reader (Research Assoc. Professor) at the Australian National University Dept. of Computer Science (1989-1991); and principal research scientist at the German Research Center for Computer Science (GMD, St. Augustin), (1984-1989).
His scientific interests include cooperative information systems, heterogeneous database systems, object-oriented systems and modelling, distributed computing, digital libraries, electronic marketing and commerce.
Papazoglou is the founding editor and co-editor in charge of the International Journal of Cooperative Information Systems. He also serves on several committes and advisory boards for international journals such as Information Systems, AI Tools, Pattern Recognition and AI, Applied Knowledge Engineering, and Knowledge and Information Systems. He has served as general and program chair for a number of well-known international conferences such as Tools for AI (TAI), Cooperative Information Systems (CoopIS), Entity-Relionship (ER), Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS), and Data Engineering (ICDE). He has authored or edited eight books and approximately 100 journal articles and refereed conference papers. His research was/is funded by the European Commission, the Australian Research Council, the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science, and Departments of Science and Technology in Europe and Australia.
Papazoglou has given invited lectures on Information Technology related topics in several countries in Europe, in N.America, Asia and Oceania. He is a golden core member of the Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and a recipient of the prestigious IEEE certificate of appreciation - awarded to only 5 IEEE members per year - for his contributions to Computer Science as Distinguished Visitor of the IEEE.
Name: Dr. Hans Weigand
Nationality: Dutch
Email:weigand@kub.nl
Home page:http://infolab.kub.nl/people/weigand
Academic Qualifications & Experience: Hans Weigand is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Economics of Tilburg University, and a Researcher at the Infolab. He has studied Computer Science and Mathematics at the Free University in Amsterdam. His Ph.D thesis was about the application of linguistic theory in knowledge engineering. In 1989 he moved to Tilburg and worked as senior-researcher in the ESPRIT II project SPRITE (database support for technical documentation). Since 1991 he is Lecturer at the Faculty of Economics of Tilburg University and participated in the LIKE project sponsored by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). He has participated in several external projects, including two recent ESPRIT projects, TREVI (news filtering) and MEMO (electronic commerce). He has been co-organizing two international workshops on the Language/Action Perspective (LAP) and is one of the initiators of the SPECIE platform for Electronic Commerce.
His research interests include conceptual modelling, logics for knowledge representation, computational linguistics, cooperative agents, and electronic commerce. Hans Weigand has worked particularly on the use of linguistic instruments in requirements engineering. This includes work on the relationship between linguistic representations and knowledge representations, the use of upstream CASE tools that support the elicitation of design models from NL requirements documents, the use of speech act theory for the analysis of communication structures, the development of a large conceptual lexicon that integrates lexical semantics and ontological knowledge, and, more recently, the role of language in knowledge elicitation techniques such as interviewing and think-aloud protocols.
Selected Publications:
W. Hasselbring, A. Kroeber: Combining OMT with a Prototyping Approach, The Journal of Systems and Software, 43(3): 177-185, November 1998.
W. Hasselbring: The ProSet-Linda Approach to Prototyping Parallel Systems, The Journal of Systems and Software, 43(3): 187-196, November 1998.
W. Hasselbring: Erfahrungen mit dem Einsatz von anwendungsspezifischen Piktogrammen zur partizipativen Anforderungsanalyse (Experience with the use of application-specific pictograms for participatory requirements analysis), Informatik Forschung und Entwicklung, Springer-Verlag, 13(4), 1998.
J. Hoppenbrouwers et al: NL Structures and Conceptual Modelling: Grammalizing for KISS. Data & Knowledg Engineering, 1997.
M.A. Jeusfeld, M. Jarke, H.W. Nissen, M. Staudt: ConceptBase - Managing Conceptual Models about Information Systems. To appear in P. Bernus, K. Mertins, G. Schmidt (eds.): Handbook on Architectures of Information Systems, Springer-Verlag, 1998, ISBN 3-540-64453-9.
M. Jarke, P. Peters, P. Szczurko, M.A. Jeusfeld: Model-driven Planning and Design of Cooperative Information Systems. Appears in M. Papazoglou, G. Schlageter (eds.): Cooperative Information Systems - Trends and Directions, Academic Press, 1998.
B. Kr‰mer, M. P. Papazoglou (edited) ``Information Systems Interoperability'', Research Studies Press - J. Wiley & Sons, 1998.
H.W. Nissen, M.A. Jeusfeld, M. Jarke, G.V. Zemanek, H. Huber: Managing multiple requirements perspectives with metamodels. IEEE Software, 13, 2, pp. 37-48, March 1996.
M. Jarke, M.A. Jeusfeld, P. Peters, K. Pohl: Coordinating distributed organizational knowledge. Data & Knowledge Engineering, 23, 3, pp. 247-268, 1997.
M. Jarke, M.A. Jeusfeld, T. Rose: A software process data model for knowledge engineering in information systems. In Information Systems, 15, 1, 1990, pp. 85-116.
M.P.Papazoglou, L.Marinos, N.G.Bourbakis: The Organizational Impact of Integrating Multiple Tools, Journal of Software Engineering & Knowledge Engineering, vol. 1, no.2, pp. 165-188, 1991.
M.P.Papazoglou, S. Laufmann, T.K.Sellis: An Organizational Framework for Cooperating Intelligent Information Systems, Int'l Journal of Intelligent & Cooperative Information Systems: IJICIS , vol.1, no.1, pp. 169-203, March 1992.
M.P. Papazoglou, G. Schlageter (edited): Cooperative Information Systems: Current Trends and Directions, Academic Press, 1998.
H. Weigand: Linguistically Motivated Principles of Knowledge Base Systems. Foris, Dordrecht, 1990.
H. Weigand, E. Verharen, F. Dignum: Integrated Semantics for information and communication systems. In: R. Meersman (ed), Proc. IFIP WG 2.5 Conf on Database Application Semantics, Chapman & Hall, 1996.
H. Weigand: A multilingual ontology-based lexicon for news filtering. Proc. IJCAI workshop on multilingual ontologies, 1997.
Contact Details:
Principal Investigator: Dr. Wilhelm Hasselbring
Address: INFOLAB, Tilburg University, PO Box 90153, NL-5000 LE Tilburg
Telephone number: ++31 13/466-8080
Telefax number: ++31 13/466-3069
EMail: hasselbring@kub.nl
List of Members