About

OAK project

OAK is a joint team between Inria Saclay and the LRI (Computer Science Research Lab) of Université Paris Sud. Our research is on models, languages, and algorithms, for efficiently processing large-scale complex data.

In particular, we are interested in:

• data with complex structure, such as: structured documents, or trees (in particular XML or JSON), graph-based data (typically RDF), data described by complex schema and semantics (such as, for instance, expressed by an XML Schema or an RDF Schema)
• complex processing understood as fine-granularity search, transformation and update of data. While XQuery and SPARQL frame most of our prior and current work, we are more generally interested in formats for structured complex data, typically represented by nested records or graphs of connected objects;
• efficient algorithms for (i) optimizing complex data processing tasks in the cloud and (ii) efficiently executing such tasks, including using highly-optimized stores data structures. Distribution of the data and processing plays an important role here, in particular from a perspective of parallel evaluation in the cloud.

OAK is associated with the database group of University of California in San Diego.

OAK exists since April 2012 and has acquired full Inria status (“project”) in January 2013.

OAK team members and friends at Dampierre castle, June 22, 2012

Prior to that, OAK members were part of a larger Inria/LRI team called Leo (now discontinued). The latest yearly report of Leo (from 2011) is available here:  2011 activity report.

International and industrial relations

International:

Oak researchers work closely with colleagues from UCSD (USA), Politecnico di Milano (Italy), U. Basilicata and U. Pisa (Italy), TU Berlin (Germany), TU Delft (The Netherland).

National:

We collaborate with other Inria teams (AVIZ, MOSTRARE, ZENITH) and Inria-LRI teams (BioInfo). Current industrial partners include DataPublica and SAP; in the past, we have also collaborated with Thales, EADS, Bongrain, Mandriva etc.