The Department of Computer and System Sciences of the University of Rome ”La Sapienza” consists of
about 40 faculty members, plus a technical and administrative staff of 15 members. It offers courses in Computer Science at the undergraduate level (laurea and diploma) and organizes several Ph.D. programs,
including one in Computer Science. The research in Computer Science is mainly concentrated on the following areas: Artificial Intelligence, Databases, Visual Formalisms, Design and Analysis of Algorithms,
Distributed Architecture, Programming Languages, Computer Graphics. The related research activities have
been funded by several Italian and international organisations. The Database and Knowledge Representation group, led by Prof. Maurizio Lenzerini, comprises about 10 researchers. It focuses on Object-Oriented Data and Knowledge Bases, Information Integration, Data Cleaning, Data Warehouse Design, Semi-Structured Data Modelling, and Human Computer Interaction in Databases. The group has organized several international Database events, the most recent of which are CoopIS 99, and ER 99. Members of the group will be in charge of the organization of VLDB 2001 and ICDT 2003. The Database research group has been involved in many European and nataonal projects. Members of the team have been involved in the DWQbasic research European ESPRIT project (Foundations of Data Warehouse Quality), which ended in December 1999. The people who will be involved in the project are Maurizio Lenzerini (Full Professor), Daniele Nardi (Full Professor), Tiziana Catarci (Associate Professor), Giuseppe De Giacomo (Assistant Professor), Diego Calvanese (Assistant Professor), Riccardo Rosati (Assistant Professor), and Andrea Cal`ý (PhD Student).

Key Persons

Maurizio Lenzerini was born in Pavia, on December 14, 1954. Since 1990, he is full professor in Computer Science and Engineering. He is the author of several academic books on fundamentals of Computer Science, Software Engineering, and Database design. Since 1983, he has been carrying out his research activity at the Universit`a di Roma ”La Sapienza”, where he is leading a research group on Databases and Artificial Intelligence. His main research interests are oriented towards conceptual and semantic data modeling, data integration, data warehousing, semistructured data management, knowledge representation and reasoning, and object-oriented methodologies. He is currently involved in national and international research projects on data integration, data warehousing, and semi-structured data. He is the author of more than 200 publications in international conferences and journals, including the most prestigious ones in the above mentioned areas, such as Journal of Computer and System Science, Information and Computation, Artificial Intelligence, Information Systems, IEEE Data and Knowledge Engineering, ACM-PODS, ACMSIGMOD, IEEE-ICDE, VLDB, ICDT, IJWAI, AAAI, KR, CoopIS. He is the editor of several international books, including a recent one on ”Data Warehouse Quality” collecting results on DWQ, a recent European research project funded by Esprit. He is regularly a member of the Program Committee of the most important international conferences in the above areas, including IJCAI, AAAI, EDBT, PCDS, KR, CoopIS, ER, ICDT. He is a member of the Editorial Board of various international journals. He is the editor of Information Systems: An International Journal, for the area of Data Modeling, Knowledge Representation and Reasoning. He organized several international conferences and workshops. He was Program co-Chair of the 4th International Conference on Cooperative Information Systems, that was held in Edinburgh in 1999. He was the Conference Chair of the International Conference on Conceptual Modeling, which was held in Paris in 1999. He will be the Program Chair of the International Conference on Database Theory, 2003.

Daniele Nardi was born in Parma (Italy) 1/7/58. He is full professor in Computer Science and Engineering.
In 1985 he was International Fellow at the Artificial Intelligence Center of SRI International (Menlo Park, California), and of Computer Science Department of Stanford University (Stanford, California), funded partly by a grant of CNR, partly from SRI International and partly from Stanford University. Since 1986 he has been working at DIS, first becoming Ricercatore (1988) and then Professore Associato (1992). He has participated in many national and international research projects, among others Advanced Issues in Knowledge Representation, funded by CEE, ”Progetto Finalizzato Informatica e Calcolo Parallelo”, funded by the Italian Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, ESPRIT Basic Research COMPULOG I and II (1989-1994). His current research interests are mainly in the field of Artificial Intelligence in the area of Knowledge representation and reasoning, and, in particular, taxonomic reasoning, meta-reasoning, non monotonic reasoning, and intelligent information integration. Other research interests are Logic Programming, Intelligent Tutoring Systems, Program synthesis, Theorem proving, Office Automation, Software Engineering, and Image Processing. His research results are reported in several publications on international journals, books conference’s proceedings. He also received the “IJCAI-91 Publisher’s Prize” for the paper “Tractable Concept Languages”, and the prize ”Intelligenza Artificiale 1993” from the Associazione Italiana per l’Intelligenza Artificiale (AI*IA) for his innovative contribution to the field of Artificial Intelligence through research accomplished in Italy.

Riccardo Rosati is assistant professor (ricercatore) at the Universit`a di Roma ”La Sapienza”. In 1996
he was International Fellow at the Artificial Intelligence Center of SRI International (Menlo Park, California).
In 1997 he completed his PhD in Computer Science at the Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica,
Universita’ di Roma ”La Sapienza”. He was then the recipient of a TMR - Marie Curie research postdoc
training grant (European Commission), held at the technical University of Vienna in 1998/1999. His
research interests include knowledge representation and reasoning, database and knowledge base applications, planning and reasoning about actions. He is the author of more than 50 publications in international conferences and journals, including the most prestigious ones in the above mentioned areas.