Annual report 2005

Information Management

The specialisation area of Information Management (Information Systems) studies methods, techniques, and tools needed in processing large volumes of data, often implemented as a database, frequently also using structured representations such as XML. The education in the specialisation area covers database management, text and document management, information retrieval, and data mining.

The courses of this specialisation area are designed to teach conceptual and physical data models, how to choose the data-management methods best suited to specific problems, and how to implement challenging information systems. The advanced (or laudatur-level) courses deal with the analysis of large data collections, the design of systems for the management of text collections, and the design and maintenance of database systems. More specific subareas are covered by seminars on varying topics.

The research in information systems is strongly focused on data mining and document management, including language technology. Techniques of analyzing and mining data from various sources for useful information are the key research topics. The research includes both method development and applications, for instance in gene technology (gene mapping and diagnostics), bioinformatics (biological data mining), proactive computing (context recognition by user situation data analysis), and information retrieval and publishing industry (cross-language question answering, information extraction in text, knowledge-support systems, topic detection and tracking). Research in the database area is focused on database structures and transaction management. Computer-aided teaching environments have been developed for database courses.

Teaching and research : http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/info/