The IMS Research Group

The Information Management Systems (IMS) Research Group was formed in the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Padua, in 1987 when the department was established.

The group activities are concerned with the design, modeling and implementation of advanced information retrieval tools - such as search engines - and digital library systems.

The main research areas covered by IMS are:

• Digital Cultural Heritage
• Information Retrieval
• Machine Learning
• Web of Data
• Structured Data

The IMS research on Information Retrieval addresses theoretical methods and experimental approaches for the efficient and effective gathering, indexing, organization and retrieval of all and only the multimedia data that are relevant to users' information needs from large document collections. Specific research efforts have been directed to solve crucial aspects of retrieval of information from the Web and to design and implement effective search engines.

The IMS research on Digital Libraries addresses methods, systems, and tools to build and make available effective and distributed digital library management systems to end users. What makes Digital Libraries different from the Web is the rigorous and sophisticated organization of heterogeneous multimedia data, and the need to support distributed, fast and easy access to those data.

Through its long-standing tradition in information retrieval, and more recently in digital libraries, the group has gained a strong reputation at the national and European level, and it has good relationships with many outstanding researchers worldwide.

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