List of Members
Institute Name: Norwegian Institute of TechnologyDescription: The participation in the network of excellence will be led by the Information Systems Group at NTH's Faculty for Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, in cooperation with researchers employed by SINTEF, which will take the contractual responsibilities of the project.
SINTEF is a non-profit R\&D organisation with a staff of about 2400 engaged in all aspects of contract research. It is closely associated with The Norwegian Institute of Technology (NTH) which is part of the University of Trondheim. A significant part of its research activities is conducted on premises belonging to NTH, and personnel from both institutions often cooperate closely on the same projects.
SINTEF and NTH have a total staff of approx. 500 engaged in Information Technology R&D. NTH has approx. 1200 Information Technology students in its MSc.programme, and is rapidly expanding its PhD. programme.
The Information Systems group has previously developed the PPP modelling environment, involving the description of both static and dynamic aspects of information systems, and providing automatic generation of schemas and runtime code from those descriptions. Furthermore, the experience of the group in the TEMPORA project is of specific relevance, particularly, the work on the conceptual languages and the coupling between the different languages. The PPP and TEMPORA work forms an ideal basis for work on requirements engineering in the proposed network of excellence.
The Information Systems group has been conducting research in the area of Information Systems Engineering, which comprises all systems development phases, from knowledge acquisition and requirements engineering through organisational design and software design to implementation and maintenance. Recent efforts of relevance for the project are mainly taking place in the domestic BEST programme which is funded by a consortium of Norwegian Industry and the Norwegian Research council.
In the 5-year period 1989-1994 the Information Systems group has advised 12 defended PhD. thesis, and expects to turn out PhD.'s at a rate of approx. 2 per year over the next years to come. the average number of advised master thesis per year varies between 15 and 30.
The following aspects of contributions to previous EU projects are of particular interest for the network of excellence: semantic data modelling, process modelling rule modelling methods for specification management (e.g., versioning) capture support performance modelling
SINTEF is a member of the European Consortium of Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM), which has partners in 13 European countries, including Scandinavia and Central/Eastern Europe. Most are independent Research and Development laboratories, with strong links to local industry. ERCIM partners have generated over 100 spin-off companies and do joint developments with SMEs. SINTEF can use its ERCIM partners to establish exploitation paths in those countries not directly covered by the Project partners.
Researchers associated with the project:
Prof. Arne Solvberg,
Brief CVs of Key Researchers:
Name: Prof Arne Solvberg
Nationality: Norwegian
Academic Qualifications & Experience: Arne Solvberg has been a professor at The Norwegian Institute of Technology, The University of Trondheim, Norway, since 1974. He received a MSc.in Applied Physics in 1963, and a PhD in Computer Science in 1971, both from The Norwegian Institute of Technology. His main fields of competence are information systems design methodology, database design, information modelling (knowledge representation) and software engineering environments.
Prof. Solvberg has been responsible for SINTEF participation in the two ESPRIT projects 2143 IMSE --- An Integrated Modeling Support Environment, and 2469 TEMPORA --- Integrating Database Technology, Rule-Based Systems and Temporal Reasoning for Effective Software. He is currently a member of the board of a domestic collaborative R&D project BEST - Integrated Distributed Information Systems, which comprises nine large organisations from industry and public administration, as well as research institutes, and 10 doctoral students.
He has been active in international organisations for research cooperation. He was Norwegian national representative to IFIP in 1979-82. He has been chairman of IFIP WG8.1 for Information Systems Design in 1982-88. He was a trustee in the VLDB Endowment. He was one of the founders of the CAiSE conference series. He is presently SINTEF's representative on the Executive Committee of ERCIM - the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics.
He has published a number of technical reports in Norwegian and English, two textbooks in Norwegian, and a number of conference and journal papers. A textbook on Information Systems Engineering was published by Springer-Verlag in 1993.
Contact Details:
Principal Investigator: Prof. Arne Solvberg
EMail: Arne.Solvberg@idt.unit.no
List of Members