The DataBase Group is the research database group at the Department of Computer Engineering of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia; it is led by Professor Sonia Bergamaschi and is composed of about 10 researchers. Its research activities focuses on Intelligent Database Systems and Intelligent Information Integration. Since 1985 the group was very active in the area of coupling artificial intelligence (Description Logics) and database techniques to develop Intelligent Database Systems. On this topic very relevant theoretical results have been obtained and a system (ODB-Tools) performing consistency check and semantic query optimization in Object Oriented Databases was developed.

More recently, research efforts have been devoted to the Intelligent Information Integration topic. An I3 system, called MOMIS, which provides an integrated access to structured and semistructured data sources and permits a user to pose a single query and receive a single unified answer has been proposed. Description Logics plus clustering techniques constitute the theoretical framework and are exploited for constructing a common ontology, i.e. an integrated view of the information in the separate sources, and for query processing and optimization.

The DataBase Group was member of AGENTLINK I, AGENTLINK II and is currently member of AGENTLINK III (European Network of Excellence for Agent-Based Computing) and Prof. Bergamaschi was co-chair of the Intelligent Information Agents group of interest of AGENTLINK II. The DataBase Group participated in several national/international research projects. More recently, the research group of Prof. Bergamaschi is involved in the following european projects:

• WINK-Web-linked Integration of Network-based Knowledge (IST-2000-28221), which is an activity within the EUTIST-AMI cluster. The specific objective of the WINK project is to validate a combination of two promising software platforms which will perform automated, efficient data collection and project management in complex smart organizations, made up of physically and organizationally remote partners participating in large-scale projects.
• SEWASIE - Semantic Webs and AgentS in Integrated Economies (IST-2001-34825), a 36 months research project, started in May 2002, that aims at implementing and advanced search engine, which will provide European SMEs with intelligent access to heterogeneous information on the Internet. The project aims at overrunning current information retrieving tools, that often are difficult to use and produce pages of links (mostly worthless) from a simple query. Prof. Bergamaschi is in charge of the scientific and administrative coordination of the project.