About the Speaker

Professor Buneman is a research leader in extending databases to new data models, type systems, and languages. He chairs the Steering Committee for the University of Edinburgh – Huawei Distributed Data Management and Processing Research Laboratory.

Abstract

If we think of a database as an artifact for publishing data — and certainly this is the purpose of most scientific databases — then why not measure its importance by the measures we use for conventional publications? In particular, the h-index is widely used for measuring the importance of a journal or the (academic) stature of an author;  can we apply it to a database?

In this talk I shall give some preliminary results to show that it is not only possible to calculate the h-index of a database, but that this can be done efficiently even when the database contains millions of “papers” and billions of “citations”. Of course, the trick is to define what we mean by a paper and a citation. The results also have consequences for how we currently measure the impact of publications.

Joint work with Dennis Dosso, Matteo Lissandrini and Gianmaria Silvello.

Date & Time: 12:45pm-13:30pm, Friday, 16th July 2021

Meeting Link: Join Microsoft Team Meeting

Tech Talk: Prof. Peter Buneman, “How Important is a database?” / Huawei-Edinburgh Joint Lab by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0