WIT

The laboratory of Web & Information Technologies belongs to the Faculty of Engineering of the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). The research of the laboratory covers two areas: information systems and semantic web.

In the area of information systems the research focuses on conceptual modeling, spatio-temporal databases, geographical information systems, data warehouses, and bio-informatics. The laboratory of Information Systems & Networks collaborates actively with the Database Laboratory of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) at Lausanne. As a result of this collaboration we have developed MADS, a spatio-temporal conceptual model that allows to capture the requirements of complex applications dealing with spatial and temporal information. The laboratory has also developed the MultiDimER model, a conceptual model targeted to data warehouses that can also include spatial and temporal features. Finally, in the area of bio-informatics, the laboratory has developed intelligent visualization techniques allowing to exploit the huge amount of information that is usually contained in biological applications.

In the area of semantic web the laboratory focuses on several issues. One of them is Semantic-based Geographical Information Systems, dealing with the semantics of spatial and temporal information. The laboratory organizes an annual international workshop on this issue SeCoGIS. Another work concerns Web usage mining, where ontologies and text-mining techniques are used for extracting relevant statistics about the usage of Web sites. Another research work covers location-based services where ontologies are used for achieving interoperability between different information providers as well as for customizing the application according to users' characteristics and users' location.