Welcome to the Data Systems Group

The Data Systems Group at the University of Waterloo's Cheriton School of Computer Science builds innovative, high-impact platforms, systems, and applications for processing, managing, analyzing, and searching the vast collections of data that are integral to modern information societies — colloquially known as “big data” technologies.

Our capabilities span the full spectrum from unstructured text collections to relational data, and everything in between including semi-structured sources such as time series, log data, graphs, and other data types. We work at multiple layers in the software stack, ranging from storage management and execution platforms to user-facing applications and studies of user behaviour.

Our research tackles all phases of the information lifecycle, from ingest and cleaning to inference and decision support.

News

Suppose you’re an archivist, librarian, or historian who’s trying to document and preserve for posterity a narrative of the COVID-19 pandemic or the ongoing Black Lives Matters protests. You’ll naturally be gathering documents from the web, and with tools available today it won’t be difficult to accumulate thousands or even millions of relevant records. How can you make sure that a scholar down the road can actually use the material that you’ve collected?