Glasgow

Site Profile

Node:

Glasgow

IDOM Role:

Administrative Server (Technology Transfer), Technical Contributor

Status:

EEC Member

Organisation:

University of Glasgow

Principal Investigators:

Prof. Malcolm Atkinson

Prof. Keith van Rijsbergen

Mr. Ray Welland

Address:

Computing Science Department

University of Glasgow

Glasgow G12 8QQ

Country:

UK

Telephone:

+44 -41 -330 4968

Fax:

+44 -41 -330 4913

E-mail:

ray@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk

WWW home page:

http://www.dcs.glasgow.ac.uk/

See http://www.dcs.glasgow.ac.uk/idom for additional IDOM-relevant information and http://www.dcs.glasgow.ac.uk/fide for additional FIDE2-relevant information maintained by this site

Anonymous FTP server:

FTP server available for Idomeneus members, not anonymous, details available from technical contact.

Gopher server:

Currently not operational because of security problems.

WAIS server:

none

Other local document servers or information systems accessible remotely via the Internet? (e.g., Telnet query services):

X500 and Finger

Contact person for technical issues (e-mail, servers, ...):

Mr. Mark Sanderson

sanderso@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk

Administrative and Organizational Contributions

Role: Administrative Server for "Database Technology Transfer"

In numerous national and international cooperations the Glasgow site has gained its reputation in technology development for advanced interdisciplinary information management. Examples of system components developed and distributed through Glasgow include various data language processors, persistent object stores, information retrieval systems, and hypermedia document servers. Glasgow conducted the PISA project on Persistent Information Space Architectures sponsored by Alvey and SERC and developed advanced technology in cooperation with industry such as ICL, the Financial Times, British Gas, Bell Northern Research, Motorola and DEC. Furthermore, the site has extensive ESPRIT experience in numerous R&D projects, for example, SHAPE on hypermedia, KWICK on hypertext and COMANDOS in distributed, open systems. Glasgow also specializes in system functionality comparison and benchmarking.

Scientific and Technical Contributions

Work Emphasis of the Site

The leader of the Glasgow Database Research Group, Malcolm Atkinson, was responsible for the initial proposal for persistent languages. That concept was jointly developed (with St Andrews) into PS-algol and its supporting storage technology. These sites have also been jointly responsible for the development of and exploitation of first class persistent procedures and flexible incremental binding. Industrialisation of this work took place within the PISA (Persistent Information Space Architecture) project. Further work on persistent languages has continued within the FIDE project (ESPRIT BRA 3070) and through other projects funded by SERC.

The Glasgow database research group have more than ten years experience of research into various aspects of language design, database implementation, and data modelling. Some examples are:

• the map construct as a general purpose bulk type with an algebra, but suitable for ordered and procedural use, has been proposed and is being developed and evaluated,
• implementation of a Sun Microsystems OODBMS benchmark for measuring Napier-88 and C++ implementations of map stores,
• development of techniques for using persistence to build DBMS,
• implementation of several interactive data model designers and design and specification tools based on process modelling,
• development of functional models for databases.

Keith van Rijsbergen leads a group which researches into Multimedia and Information Retrieval. This group is involved in the KWICK and SHAPE ESPRIT projects (see below). Other current research projects include:

• an investigation into providing access through free text queries to mixed media information (for example, text, images and video) held in a hypermedia document base,
• applying simple natural language processing techniques in an attempt to improve the performance of IR systems, in collaboration with the Financial Times,
• using neural network technology in IR, in collaboration with British Gas.

Research Projects and Cooperation

The Department has been heavily involved in ESPRIT projects. We are currently active in:

• KWICK (ESPRIT project number 2466), which is concerned with Hypermedia and knowledge representation,
• SHAPE(ESPRIT project number 5398) which is building software tools for the construction of hypermedia systems.
• SEMANTIQUE (Semantics-Based Program Manipulation Techniques, ESPRIT project number 3124),
• COMANDOS (Construction and Management of Distributed Open Systems, ESPRIT project number 2071) is designing and implementing an object-oriented platform (c.f. operating system and associated services) which supports the design, construction and management of distributed data-intensive applications.

The Department was involved in the PISA (Persistent Information Space Architecture project) funded by SERC and Alvey. Subsequently, members of this group led by Prof. M.P. Atkinson became involved in the ESPRIT BRA FIDE (Formally Integrated Data Environment, ESPRIT project number 3070) and Glasgow are now the coordinating partners of this project. There is also a SERC funded project on Bulk Type Constructors which relates closely with the FIDE project.

The Department has a number of other projects funded by SERC, for example, the III project aims to prototype an environment for creating Innovative Iconic Interfaces. Results from this project are being commercially exploited via an industrial collaboration with DEC.

Industrial and other External Liaison

We have had a number of successful collaborative projects with industry, for example with ICL, through the Alvey programme, the Financial Times, British Gas, Bell Northern Research, Motorola and DEC. Individual members of the Department provide consultancies to a wide range of industrial companies. The Department has been active in industrial training for a number of years and currently provides a wide range of courses mainly tailored for individual clients. There is also the Modular Masters Degree in Software Engineering which provides an integrated training scheme for industry. The Department has an Industrial Association which brings together a diverse collection of companies who provide a vehicle for technology transfer, dissemination of research reports and input for the teaching activities or the group.

Teaching Activities

The Department of Computing Science currently has 33 academic staff, together with 24 research assistants/fellows and about 25 postgraduate research students. There are several visiting cademics including a visiting professor from IBM (UK) and another from ICL. The Department teaches over 500 undergraduates, of whom approximately 55 take the Honours degree in Computing Science, and also provides a postgraduate taught Master's course in Information Technology which has an enrolment of about 90 students this year.

Curricula Vitae

Malcolm P. Atkinson

Malcolm Atkinson obtained his first degree from the University of Cambridge in 1966, followed by a Diploma in Computer Science in 1967. After three years research and teaching at Lancaster University he returned to Cambridge and was awarded his PhD in 1974. He then held academic posts in Burma, Cambridge, East Anglia and Edinburgh, being appointed to a senior lectureship at Edinburgh in 1983. He was a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania during 1983-84 and was appointed to a professorship in Computing Science at Glasgow University in 1984. He was head of Department of Computing Science from 1986 to 1990, following which he spent nine months on sabbatical at INRIA near Paris.

During his academic career, Malcolm Atkinson has supervised a large number of research students, acted as external examiner for several universities and been involved in the organisation of a number of international conferences. He has extensive experience of industrial consultancy including a long association with ICL and, more recently, with Perihelion Software.

Malcolm Atkinson's main research interest is in persistent programming languages, investigating the relationship between programming languages and database systems. He has held a number of research grants awarded by the UK SERC and was one of the leaders of the highly-successful PISA (Persistent Information Space Architectures) project in the Alvey research programme. Currently, he is the project leader of the ESPRIT FIDE project (BRA 3070) and is also a principal investigator on a SERC funded project on Bulk Data Types.

Cornelis J. van Rijsbergen

Keith van Rijsbergen obtained his first degree from the University of Western Australia in 1965, followed by a Dip NAAC in 1968. After a tutoring in mathematics in Western Australia he moved to Cambridge where he was awarded his PhD in 1972. He then lectured at Monash University, Melbourne for three years before returning to Cambridge as a Royal Society Information Research Fellow. In 1978 he was a Visiting Professor at the University of California at Berkeley. He was Professor and Head of Department of Computer Science at University College Dublin from 1980-86. He was appointed to his present position of Professor of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow in 1986 and became Head of Department in 1990.

Keith van Rijsbergen's main research interest is centred on the area of information storage and retrieval, having started work in this area in about 1969. Early work was concerned with the use of formal and mathematical techniques to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of information retrieval. This work culminated in the design and building of an experimental information retrieval system in Cambridge. Subsequently a prototype system was built for the Financial Times. In the last few years, his research has changed considerably towards formal semantics for data and natural language. The main application of this theoretical work will be in the design of intelligent knowledge based systems (IKBS), especially those that are concerned with the processing of large multimedia data sets. The emphasis of this work is to use memory-based reasoning wherever possible; this is in contrast with the more popular approach to use rule-based reasoning.

Keith van Rijsbergen has considerable experience within the ESPRIT programme having been involved in the projects: MINSTREL (59), KWICK (2466) and SHAPE (5398), in addition to acting as an expert consultant for the ESPRIT programme.

Significant Publications

1. M.P. Atkinson and O.P. Buneman: Types and persistence in database programming languages. ACM Computing Surveys, 19(2):105-190, June 1987.

2. M.P. Atkinson and A. England: Towards new architectures for distributed autonomous database applications. In J. Rosenberg and J.L. Keedy, editors, Security and Persistence. Proceedings of the International Workshop on Computer Architectures to Support Security and Persistence of Information (Bremen, West Germany, 8-11 May 1990), Workshops in Computing, pages 356-377. Springer-Verlag in collaboration with the British Computer Society, 1990.

3. M.P. Atkinson, C. L├ęcluse, P.C. Philbrow, and P. Richard: Design issues in a map language. In P. Kanellakis and J.W. Schmidt, editors, Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Database Programming Languages (Nafplion, Greece, 27th-30th August 1991), 2929 Campus Drive, Suite 260, San Mateo, Calif. 94403, 1991. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers.

4. M.P. Atkinson, P. Richard, and P. Trinder: Bulk types for large scale programming. In J.W. Schmidt and A.A. Stogny, editors, Next Generation Information System Technology. Proceedings of the First International East/West Database Workshop (Kiev, USSR, 9th-12th October 1990), number 504 in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 228-250. Springer-Verlag, 1991.

5. R. Cooper and I. Tabkha: A semantic framework for the design of data intensive applications in a persistent programming language. In Proceedings of the Twenty-fifth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (January 1992), 1992.

6. M.D. Dunlop and C.J. van Rijsbergen: Access methods for non-textual documents. In Proceedings ACM SIGIR Conference on Multimedia Information Systems (Singapore, 1991), 1991.

7. M.D. Dunlop and C.J. van Rijsbergen: Hypermedia and probabilistic retrieval. In Proceedings RIAO (Barcelona, 1991), 1991.

8. D. Harper and M. Norrie: Data management for object-oriented systems. In M.S. Jackson and A.E. Robinson, editors, Aspects of Databases. Proceedings of the Ninth British National Conference on Databases (Wolverhampton, England, July 1991), pages 69-92. Butterworth-Heinemann, 1991.

9. R. Morrison and M.P. Atkinson: Persistent programming - some history and future challenges. In ACSC-13, Melbourne, 1990. Invited lecture.

10. P.C. Philbrow, D. Harper and M.P. Atkinson: Supporting an object-oriented programming methodology using PS-algol. In R. Hull, R. Morrison and D. Stemple, editors, Database Programming Languages. Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Database Programming Languages (Salishan Lodge, Gleneden Beach, Oregon, June 1989), 1989. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers.