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Endangered data - why databases matter

Inaugural Lecture by Professor Peter Buneman

5.15 pm on Monday, 28 June
Lecture Theatre 2
Appleton Tower

You "found it on the Web". Do you have any confidence in what you found? When we make an on-line purchase, we have some assurance, thanks largely to database technology, that the transaction will work; but when it comes to other kinds of information, database and web technology have failed us. We typically have little idea of where the information came from, how it was constructed, and whether it will remain where we found it for others to use.

These problems are particularly acute for scientists, who increasingly rely on databases both for their source material and as a medium for publishing their findings. Their concerns include preservation, data integration, publishing, security, annotation, provenance, data cleansing, and - as always - efficiency. Some of these topics present new challenges for database research and some of them suggest that we should re-think the principles upon which database systems are designed. The lecture will discuss these issues and how research by the Database Group and the Digital Curation Centre at the University of Edinburgh is helping to solve them.

Peter Buneman - A Short Biography

Peter Buneman is Professor of Database Systems in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. His work in computer science has focused mainly on databases and programming languages, specifically: active databases, database semantics, approximate information, query languages, types for databases, data integration, bioinformatics and semistructured data - an area in which he has co-authored a book. He has recently worked on issues associated with scientific databases such as data provenance, archiving and annotation. He has served on numerous programme committees, editorial boards and working groups, and has been programme chair for ACM SIGMOD, ACM PODS and ICDT. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, a fellow of the ACM and the recipient of a Royal Society Wolfson Merit Award. He is research director of the UK Digital Curation Centre.

Before joining the University of Edinburgh, Peter Buneman was a Professor at the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his undergraduate degree from Cambridge University, his graduate degree from the University of Warwick, and he did postdoctoral work at the University of Edinburgh. He has held visiting positions at the University of Glasgow, Imperial College, Kyoto University and INRIA. In addition to computer science he has made contributions to graph theory and to the mathematics of phylogeny.