Department 5: Databases and Information Systems

Headed by Prof. Dr. Gerhard Weikum

With the official retirement of its director, Gerhard Weikum, the department is phasing out. Over two decades, it has advanced computational foundations, methods and tools for data, knowledge and language, with numerous contributions to database systems, information retrieval, data mining, web research, knowledge management, and natural language processing. Our impact includes the Yago-Naga project on knowledge for semantic search, the TopX and RDF-3X search engines for semi-structured data, the AIDA/ambiverseNLU toolsuite for entity linking, methods for claim credibility and for fair rankings, systems for question answering, and more. Yago was one of the trendsetters and early blueprints for the automatic construction and curation of large knowledge graphs. Current research mostly focuses on question answering over knowledge graphs, web tables and text collections, and the role of large language models in knowledge extraction and other tasks.