The reverse engineering of relational databases has received an increasing interest these last few years due to the need of a more effective use of databases whose semantics has become uncertain. In order to have an efficient reverse engineering process, realistic assumptions have to be made on the physical DB schema and the user's involvement for providing knowledge on data and for validating the result.
The DREAM project is aimed at providing a method for RDB reverse engineering which exploits several sources for gathering information on data, such as DBMS's dictionary, SQL statement analysis and data exploration. The only assumption on the DB schema is the 1rst normal form. Finally tools based on terminological logics are proposed for the validation phase.
About the speaker: J.Kouloumdjian was born in 1938. After a PhD in nuclear physics in 69, he switched to computer sciences. He is currently full professor at the department of informatics at the National Institute for Applied Sciences (INSA) in Lyon. His domain of interest are deductive DBs (he was involved in an ESPRIT project from 85 to 91), information system design, relational DB reverse engineering (93-97) and more recently video DB modeling and indexing (since 97).
He was the head of the Information System Engineering Laboratory -LISI- (which he created in 1990) until 1997. This lab, common to INSA and the University Claude Bernard of Lyon, is composed of 8 professors and 30 other permanent members.
He is a member of the ACM, IEEE and the IFIP working group WG 2.6 "Databases".
Referent: Prof. Dr. Jacques Kouloumdjian
Dpt of informatics
LISI- Laboratoire d'Ingénierie des Systèmes d'Information
Laboratory for Information Systems Engineering
INSA
20 AV. A.Einstein
FR-69621 Villeurbanne CEDEX
Zeitpunkt: Freitag, 4. Dezember 1998, 14 Uhr c. t.
Ort: HS 3 der Universität Klagenfurt