Prof. Dr. Erhard Rahm from the University of Leipzig and his former Ph.D. student Sergey Melnik will receive this year's Influential Paper Award of the International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE). Dr. Melnik, who now works for Google, received his Ph.D. in 2004 with distinction at the Graduate School Knowledge Representation of the University of Leipzig. His dissertation was awarded with a prize by the German society for computer science. Prof. Rahm teaches and conducts research on databases at the Institute of computer science and supervised his thesis.
Together with Prof. Dr. Hector Garcia-Molina of Stanford University (USA) they wrote the paper "Similarity Flooding: A Versatile Graph Matching Algorithm and its Application to Schema Matching". According to Google Scholar this work has already been cited over a thousand times by other researchers. The publication describes a new algorithm called Similarity Flooding for the automated matching of graphs, one of the key data structures in computer science. Based on the similarity of individual nodes the method iteratively determines the similarity of nodes and subgraphs by increasingly considering the neighboring nodes. The approach can be used for the matching of database schemas and ontologies, thereby making it possible to integrate different information sources, for example, on the web. In the last decade, the work has achieved great significance in research and development.
The award ceremony will take place at the ICDE conference in Brisbane on April 10, 2013. The Influential Paper Award is given annually to award groundbreaking scientific work in the field of Data Engineering.
Translation of the German press release of the University of Leipzig from Feb. 22, 2013
