ETH Zurich

Link to partner web site

www.systems.ethz.ch

Company introduction

The Systems Group at ETH Zurich has long-term experience in the design and implementation of large-scale information systems. The research covers all aspects of core database technology (query processing, distributed and Web-based information systems, XML technologies, and quality assurance) as well as the development of large-scale, complex application systems. The group has tight collaborations with industry in several domains (e.g., financial, travelling, and high-tech), standardization bodies (in particular W3C), and top Academic institutions around the world (e.g., Berkeley, Stanford, INRIA). The group has worked on models, languages, and systems in order to generate events from network routers, database systems, and application systems (as part of application frameworks or online log analysis). To this end, the group has proposed extensions to the W3C XQuery standard which are currently under consideration for Version 1.1 of this standard, due in fall 2007. Furthermore, the group has worked on scripting extensions for streaming XML processing; the proposed extensions are also chartered for standardization by the W3C XML Processing Working Group. The MXQuery engine developed in the Systems Group, is a reference implementation for the W3C for the emerging XQuery/XPath standards.

The work on complex event processing is highly relevant for MASTER Activity 4 in which languages and systems to generate, pre-process, and route events are developed. The MXQuery engine will be extended as a core component of the monitoring infrastructure of Activity 4.

The DBIS group is a member of NESSI and has been involved in NESSI activities through a collaboration with Siemens in the past. Furthermore, the group is member of the DELOS network of excellence supported by the EU.

Key personnel

DBIS: Prof. Dr. Donald Kossmann is professor for Computer Science at ETH Zurich since 2004. Before that, he was professor at the University of Heidelberg and the Technical University of Munich. He is on the editorial board of ACM Transactions on Database Systems and ACM Transactions on Internet Technology. He is a co-founder of i-TV-T AG, Munich, a company that develops supplier relationship management software. He was a co-founder of XQRL, Inc. which was acquired by BEA Systems in 2002. The technology developed by XQRL Inc. is the basis for XML processing inside the BEA Weblogic and BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform products of BEA.

Dr. Peter Fischer is a senior researcher at ETH Zurich. He is one of the world-wide experts in Information Filtering and data dissemination. Among others, he is a co-designer of the YFilter technology at the University of California, Berkeley, which is the basis for several industrial content-based routing products in the USA.

Involvement/Role in the project

ETH primary contributions are towards the design and implementation of the monitoring infrastructur. ETH leads WPs 4.1 (Signalling and monitoring infrastructure). In addition, ETH contributes to the overall architecture, models and languages.