Databases have long been of outmost importance in administrative applications, and are now becoming of increasing importance also in engineering and telecommunication applications. A major reason for this is the rapid increase in efficiency of databases. Nowadays (1995) databases of sizes 1-10 Gbyte can be held in primary memory, which allows very fast data access. Database technology, including advanced query languages, object-oriented data models, active databases (automatically responding to occurring events), mediators for linking different databases together, etc, have also been instrumental for the importance of the database technology in industrial engineering applications.
The goal for the activities on database technology within ISIS is to investigate and develop it for telecommunication network, control, modeling, simulation and supervision applications. This will involve getting a clear hand on real-time aspects, finding out how intelligent signal processing and model building can take place within a database, and how databases best can be linked to sensor inputs of various kinds.
During the first years the activities in the area will concentrate on the development of an open real-time performing database architecture, real time query processing, active database support for control applications, and database support for navigation applications.