Datawarehousing
Datawarehousing is an ongoing interest and this will continue to be true as we consider various mechanisms to ensure data privacy when it is intergrated into a central repository. There are several open questions in this area so students interested in working in this area should contact me to identify possible points of collaboration. It would be most helpful if you would send me a specific statement of interest in this area to initiate a dicussion.
Additional research in this area has/is occuring in two distinct directions:
Technically: Past research has opened up issues such as the integration of legacy data sources and the techniques required to capture semantic and meta-data information. To date, we have developed a tool capable of extracting semantic information from various well structured data sources (they must be ODBC compliant). We are currently interested in understanding how data warehouses could be used to store non-traditional kinds of data such as images found in filmless radiology, map data used in GIS systems, or genomic/protemoic data used in bioinformatics.
Applications: Given the enormous volumes of data found in the emerging field of bioinformatics, it is clear that new techniques are required to efficiently store and retrieve it. Two projects currently being undertaken are clearrly warehouse in scale. The St. Boniface project storing medical image data will be tera-bytes in size and the need to efficiently store and distributed that data over a wide area network will be technically very challenging. Secondly, the visualization data being used by Dr. Sensen's group will also represent tera-bytes of data that must be efficiently stored, retrieved, and processed to ensure that "real-time" images appear in the cave in a timely and scientifically interesting way. The former is actually a distributed datawarehouse project while the latter is a centralized one but both are inherently challenging as they present several open questions for the interested researcher.
If you interested in this aspect of our work and believe you are qualified to join our group, we encourage you to fill in our pre-application form. This can also be reached off the main Departmental Web Page (www.cpsc.ucalgary.ca) and following the link to "Graduate Studies". Please be sure to indicate me as a potential supervisor or I will not see your application for review.