Informatikk:
Research and Teaching in Norway
A Critical Evaluation

NAVF: The Council for Natural Science Research 1992, ISBN 82-7216-813-0

Page 36. Copied with the authorization of NAVF, Rune Dyre, by Petter Reinholdtsen - petterr@stud.cs.uit.no

Open Distributed Systems (ODS)

Permanent scientific positions

1 Associate Professors: Eliassen

Temporary scientific positions

1 Assistant Professors: Karlsen

Students

3 Doctoral students (1 is assisting professor and 1 is associated professor)
11 Graduate students:
- 7 Cand. scient. (2 of these have principal supervisor outside the department)
- 4 Siv.ing. (3 of these has principal supervisor outside the department)

Theses last 5 years (1988-may 1992)

8
- 6 Cand.scient. theses and
- 2 Siv.ing. theses

Research activity

Open distributed systems are distributed systems consisting of a number of autonomous nodes interconnected via a computer network. In general the level of abstraction is higher than in the work of distributed operation systems (group 6). Topics listed in the program include architectures of integration systems for abstract data type based specifications, data manipulation and query optimization, transactions and schema integration. The programming system FRIL is the basic tool for establishing a federation of heterogeneous information bases.

Observations

Frank Eliassen has done successful work in transaction modelling in cooperation with other Norwegian, Finnish and German researchers. Their S-transaction model has been published extensively and is quite well known. The proposed plan for research would be too extensive even for a much larger group. The group should compromise on what they can do. An area such as semantic enrichment and integration could be sufficient. To do research it is not necessary to actually build a whole heterogeneous system.

Recommendations

The scientific goals should be made specific. The abstractions should not be the only research contribution. A cooperation partner would be useful. At the beginning it could be wise to have a suitably chosen visitor in the vacant position.