The objective of the Verso group is to develop novel solutions to problems of database management. This includes the improvement of existing system functionalities such as in object-oriented systems ; fundamental investigation to lay the foundations of such systems ; the study of new applications to validate the results and suggest improvements ; and finally the development of virtual databases interoperating with other systems for multimedia applications and access to the World Wide Web.
Object-oriented database systems are becoming popular in the
industrial world. However, to be really competitive, this new
technology must be improved and, in particular, it must provide
more independence between the physical and logical layers. A view
mechanism on top of the O
system has been developed for this purpose, as well
as new query optimization techniques.
The theoretical part of the research done at Verso is concerned with understanding the fundamental aspects of database models and their links with the development of new tools. An important direction of research is the study of the complexity and expressiveness of database languages, taking into account aspects such as new data types, reflexivity, concurrency and parallelism.
The specific applications we considered are hypertext,
electronic documents and geographical database applications. For
instance, we are interested in high level access languages and
optimization in such contexts. A special effort is devoted to the
emerging constraint database paradigm.
Keywords : database model, database theory, object-oriented
database, multimedia base, geographic database, deductive
database, hypertext, electronic documents.
Some scientific cooperations : participation in Esprit BRA Fide2 project, Esprit R&D GoodStep project, in Esprit Idomeneus Network of Excellence, in the Ercim group for databases ; participation in two joint EC-NSF contracts ; involvement in Franco-Chinese advanced research programs, collaboration with the Hebrew and Tel Aviv Universities.