What is DBTA?

The aim of DBTA is to foster exchange between information systems professionals in Switzerland. The events organized by DBTA cover a wide range of topics such as databases, information systems, knowledge management, and information retrieval.

DBTA was founded in 1986 as the Databases Interest Group of the Swiss Informatics Society (SI). The original goal was to foster exchange between research theory at universities and research labs, and practitioners such as application developers, database administrators and IT managers, resulting in the name DBTA as an abbreviation of Data Base Theory and Applications. Over the years, the main interests of both researchers and practitioners has expanded to address issues of large-scale distribution and integration of heterogeneous Big Data and information services. Therefore, nowadays DBTA interests include:

  • Database technologies and applications
  • Distributed data management
  • Data Integration
  • Data Streams
  • Large-scale information systems
  • Knowledge management
  • Information retrieval

To reflect this change, it was decided in 2004 that although the short name DBTA would remain, it should now be known as the sepcial interest group in information systems.