Data Management and Engineering

In many applications, management and integration of heterogeneous data is a major challenge. The data management research group develops scalable data management solutions for small and big data in different areas (life science healthcare, industry), which integrate data from various sources and make them available for data analysis. A sophisticated meta data management approach is applied to extract meta data from various sources, to enrich those with semantic annotations and to integrate them via semi-automatic matching.

Additionally, the data integration approach is based on an incremental and interactive process. Data sources will first be filled into a data lake, retaining their original structure. The data lake provides a common access method for semi-structured data. Afterwards, step-wise data integration is performed with a focus on the demands of a particular application. We bypass the huge efforts demanded by a "global" data integration inherent in many data warehouse approaches. Instead, application-oriented integration is put into the hands of users via powerful and friendly user interfaces.

Current projects include:

• Next Generation Dataspaces Initiative (NGDI)
• Datenraum Kultur
• DIANA-T – Digitale Leistungen, Datenintegration und Datenautonomie für eine nachhaltigere Tourismusbranche
• Data Spaces Support Centre 
• DeployEMDS – Towards a common European mobility data space (EMDS)
• KIOPTIPACK – Ganzheitliche KI-basierte Optimierung von Kunststoffverpackungen mit Rezyklatanteil
• WestAI – KI-Services aus NRW für Deutschland
• ENGAGE

We work closely in research and teaching with the Chair of Databases and Information Systems (Computer Science 5) at RWTH Aachen University and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Niederrhein University of Applied Sciences. In addition to joint research projects, courses are also offered in the areas of big data, research data management, metadata management and data integration. The group also runs a number of courses at the Bonn-Aachen International Center for Information Technology (b-it).

The courses offered include, among others

• Data science
  
• Big Data Technologies
• Semantic Data Integration
• Business informatics
• Process management