Sonia Bergamaschi

Sonia Bergamaschi was born in Modena (Italy) and received her Laurea degree in Mathematics from Università di Modena on 1977. She is currently full professor of Computer Engineering in the Engineering Faculty at the Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia (associate professor from 1992 to 1999) and leads the "DBGROUP" , i.e. the database research group, at the Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'informazione (www.dbgroup.unimore.it). Her research activity has been mainly devoted to knowledge representation and management in the context of very large databases facing both theorical and implementation aspects. Since 1985 she 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, based on this theoretical results, has been developed. More recently, her research efforts have been devoted to the Intelligent Information Integration (I3) topic. An I3 system, called MOMIS, to provide an integrated access to structured and semistructured data sources and to allow a user to pose a single query and to 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. Sonia Bergamaschi was coordinator (2001-2002) of the Intelligent Information Agents group of the european network of excellence AgentLinkII. Since 2002 her research activities has been extended to “Semantic Web”. In this area she coordinated the IST European Research project “SEWASIE”, whose aim was to develop a semantic search engine, and participates in the IST European Research project “WINK”. From 2005 to 2010 she was dean of the International Doctorate School in ICT of the University of Modena & Reggio Emilia. On 2009 she promoted as founder member the university start-up "DATARIVER" to promote the diffusion of an open source version of the MOMIS system (www.datariver.it). From 2010 to june 2012, she was dean of the department of Computer Engineering at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. She was responsible for the University of Modena & Reggio Emilia of the IST european projects “STASIS” and "FACILITATE" and national coordinator of the MUR FIRB project “NeP4B”, whose goal is the development of a network, based on a p2p architecture, for exchanging and sharing knowledge among PMI. She has published more than two hundred of international journal and conference papers and her researches have been founded by the Italian MURST, CNR, ASI institutions and by European Community projects. She has served on the committees of international and national database and AI conferences. She is a member of the IEEE Computer Society and of the ACM. For a detailed description of the research activity and of the developed systems see: www.dbgroup.unimore.it.