Institute Name: Vrije Universiteit, Department of Computer Science
Description: The Department of Computer Science of the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science at the Free University has about 30 people as academic staff and 20 PhD. students. The Department is organized in research sections. Two sections will contribute to this project, namely the Information Systems and the Software Engineering sections.
The Information Systems section has one full professor (van de Riet) and two associate professors (Wieringa and de Jonge). The research interests range from technical aspects of (OO) database systems (de Jonge) to Conceptual Modelling (Wieringa). There is some emphasis on linguistic aspects of conceptual modelling, especially given the involvment of CASE tools. This research is carried out in a national project called LIKE (Linguistic Inbstruments for knowledge Engineering) together with KUB (Tilburg), TUD (Delft) and TUE (Eindhoven). Further research concerns an OO knowledge base system, called MOKUM, which enables experimentation with active objects communicating` with each other (as cybernauts in cyberspace). Protection aspects (security and privacy) are also studied in this context. There is also a close contact with a multi-national auditing firm about a computer aided auditing tool, which that firm is making. The IS section is cooperating within the Erasmus program to exchange students in the area of IS, KBS and SE. The program is called ENDKE (European Network for Data and Knowledge Engineering), and includes the universities of: Trondheim, Stockholm, Paris, Aachen, Klagenfurt, Lausanne and Crete. Van de Riet is the coordinator of ENDKE.
The Software Engineering section has one full professor (van Vliet) and two associate professors (van der Veer and Eliens). The research interests in the sevtion include software reuse, process models, human computer interaction, task analysis, and object-oriented frameworks for modelling intelligent distributed hypermedia systems. An active collaboration with industry partners has been established, regarding most of these topis. The section also collaborates with a number of university partners in the COST-14 working group of IMPACT (Interdisciplinary Practice and Design for Cooperation Technology).
Brief CVs of Key Researchers:
Name: Prof. van de Riet
Nationality: Dutch
Academic Qualifications & Experience: Since 1970, Reinder Pieter van de Riet (1939) has been a professor in Computer Science at the Free University in Amsterdam. He studied Mathematics and was a researcher at the Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science in Amsterdam. His PhD. Thesis was on "Algol 60 as Formula Manipulation Language" (advisor: Prof. van Wijngaarden, 1968). He has been supervised eight PhD. Students. He founded the Computer Science Department at the Free University and the Dutch Foundation for Research in Computer Science (SION). Now, he is a member of the Gebieds Bestuur E (Council for natural Sciences) of NWO.
His research areas are: Databases and Knowledge bases.
He was Conference Chairman of: "Distributed Databases" (Amsterdam, 1981), "Fifth Generation and Super Computers" (Rotterdam, 1984), "Frontiers in Computing" (Amsterdam, 1988) and "Very Large Data Bases" (Amsterdam, 1989). He has been the consulting editor (until 1989) of the Future Generation Computer Systems (Elsevier) and the editor of Europe of Data and Knowledge Engineering (Elsevier),.since its foundation in 1985. He is a member of the editorial board of the Information Systems Journal. He is a member of ACM, IEEE (CS), NGI, WG, KNOV and several program committees.
He has writen 4 books, edited 3 books and published over 70 papers in journals and conference proceedings.
Name: Van Vliet
Nationality: Dutch
Academic Qualifications & Experience: J.C. van Vliet is with the Free University since 1987. Prior to his curent position, he was a senior researcher at the Centre of Mathematics and Computer Science in Amsterdam. He also spent one year as a visiting scientist at IBM Research, San Jose. He is the author of "Software Engineering: Principles and Practice", John Wiley, 1992.
Name: R.J. Wieringa
Nationality: Dutch
Dr. Roel Wieringa studied mathematics at the State University of Groningen and philosophy at the State University of Amsterdam. He finished his PhD. thesis in 1990, entitled ``Algebraic Foundations of Conceptual Models''. He is currently Lecturer at the Free University of Amsterdam. For the past five years, he has been conducted research in integrating methods for requirements engineering and specifying external system behavior. This work resulted in a framework for classical (structured) analysis methods, including real time extensions, as well as more recent object-oriented methods. In addition, he has carried out research in combining informal, semi-formal and formal specification techniques for requirements. Part of this research has been conducted within the Esprit III BRAs IS-CORE and ModelAge and has given rise a book of ``recipes'' from different methods that can be used in requirements engineering, and a formal specification language (LCM) that can be used in combination with informal and semi-formal requirements engineering methods. His current work includes the construction of a requirements workbench that can manipulate different requirements techniques in an integrated manner and produce animated simulations of specified systems.
Selected Publications:
J.F.M.Burg, R.P. van de Riet,S.C.Chang.(1993): A Data Dictionary as a Lexicon: An Application of Linguistics in Information Systems,in: B.Bhargava, T.Finin, Y.Yesha (Eds.) Proc. of the 2nd Intl Conf. on Inf. and Knowledge Mgt, CIKM93, pp.114-123.
V. van Swede & J.C. van Vliet.(1994): Consistent Development; results of a first empirical study on the relation between project scenario and success, in Advanced Information Systems Engineering (Eds. G. Wijers, S. Brinkkemper and T. Wasserman), Proceedings CAiSE94, Springer Lecture Notes 811 , pp 80-93.
J.F.M. Burg, R.P. van de Riet.(1995): COLOR-X: Linguistically-based Event Modeling: A General Approach to Dynamic Modeling, To appear in J. Iivari, K. Lyytinen and M. Rossi (eds.), The Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Advanced Information System Engineering, Jyvaskyla, Finland Springer-Verlag's Lecture Notes in Computer Science
R.B. Feenstra and R.J. Wieringa. (1995):Validating constraints and updates using automated reasoning techniques, Proceedings of the Workshop on Semantics in Databases, (ed) B. Thalheim ,pp. 24--32
R.J. Wieringa.(1996): Requirements Engineering: Frameworks for Understanding.
Wiley
Contact Details:
Principal Investigator: Dr. Roel Wieringa,
Address:Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, Vrije Universiteit, 1081a De Boelelaan, Amsterdam, 1081 HV, THE NETHERLANDS
Telephone number: +31 20 4447771
Telefax number: +31 20 4447653
EMail: roelw@cs.vu.nl
List of Members