Bertram Ludäscher

• Faculty Affiliate, Department of Computer Science
• Faculty Affiliate, National Center for Supercomputing Applications

Data and knowledge management, specifically the modeling, design, and optimization of scientific workflows, provenance, data integration, and knowledge representation; scientific workflow systems; data curation.

• Best paper award at ProvenanceWeek 2018 for "Validation and Inference of Schema-Level Workflow Data-Dependency Annotations"
• Listed on the Google Scholar Classic Papers list for "Software Systems"

Bertram Ludäscher is a leading figure in data and knowledge management, focusing on the modeling, design, and optimization of scientific workflows, provenance, data integration, and knowledge representation. He is one of the founders of the open source Kepler scientific workflow system project and a co-lead of the DataONE Working Group on Provenance in Scientific Workflows. Ludäscher also develops workflow technology for quality control and data curation; e.g., of biodiversity data in natural history collections. He leads the NSF-funded Euler project, where he is developing logic-based methods for the alignment and merging of biological taxonomies.

In addition to his appointment as a professor at the iSchool, Ludäscher holds an appointment at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and an affiliate appointment at the Department of Computer Science. Before coming to Illinois in Fall 2014, Ludäscher was a professor at the Department of Computer Science and the Genome Center at the University of California, Davis. He previously worked at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UC San Diego where until 2004 he was an associate research scientist, leading the Knowledge-Based Information Systems Lab. He received his MS in computer science from the Technical University of Karlsruhe in 1992 and his PhD in computer science from the University of Freiburg in 1998.

• Spring 2025 - Data Mgmt, Curation, & Reprodu - IS477ACG
• Spring 2025 - Data Mgmt, Curation, & Reprodu - IS477ACU
• Spring 2025 - Independent Study - IS589BL

By appointment, please contact professor

B. Ludäscher, N. Podhorszki, I. Altintas, S. Bowers, T. McPhillips, From Computation Models to Models of Provenance: The RWS Approach, Concurrency and Computation: Practice & Experience, special issue on the First Provenance Challenge, 2007.

T. M. McPhillips, S. Bowers, D. Zinn, and B. Ludäscher. Scientific Workflow Design for Mere Mortals. Future Generation Computer Systems (FGCS), 25(5):541–551, 2009.

S. Bowers and B. Ludäscher. An Ontology Driven Framework for Data Transformation in Scientific Workflows. In International Workshop on Data Integration in the Life Sciences (DILS), LNCS 2994, Leipzig, Germany, March 2004.

A. Brinckman, K. Chard, N. Gaffney, M. Hategan, M. B. Jones, K. Kowalik, S. Kulasekaran, B. Ludäscher, B. D. Mecum, J. Nabrzyski, V. Stodden, I. J. Taylor, M. J. Turk, and K. Turner. Computing Environments for Reproducibility: Capturing the "Whole Tale." Future Generation Computer Systems, February 2018

S. Lee, S. K¨ohler, B. Ludäscher, and B. Glavic. A SQL-Middleware Unifying Why and Why-Not Provenance for First-Order Queries. In ICDE, pp. 485–496. IEEE Computer Society, 2017.

T. McPhillips, T. Song, T. Kolisnik, S. Aulenbach, K. Belhajjame, K. Bocinsky, Y. Cao, J. Cheney, F. Chirigati, S. Dey, J. Freire, C. Jones, J. Hanken, K. W. Kintigh, T. A. Kohler, D. Koop, J. A. Macklin, P. Missier, M. Schildhauer, C. Schwalm, Y. Wei, M. Bieda, and B. Ludäscher. YesWorkflow: A User-Oriented, Language- Independent Tool for Recovering Workflow Information from Scripts. International Journal of Digital Curation (IJDC), 10(1):298–313, 2015.

Y.-Y. Cheng, N. Franz, J. Schneider, S. Yu, T. Rodenhausen, and B. Ludäscher. Agreeing to disagree: Reconciling conflicting taxonomic views using a logic-based approach. Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T), 54(1):46–56, 2017.

N. M. Franz, N. M. Pier, D. M. Reeder, M. Chen, S. Yu, P. Kianmajd, S. Bowers, and B. Ludäscher. Two Influential Primate Classifications Logically Aligned. Systematic Biology, 65(4):561–582, July 2016.

N. M. Franz, M. Chen, S. Yu, P. Kianmajd, S. Bowers, and B. Ludäscher. Reasoning over Taxonomic Change: Exploring Alignments for the Perelleschus Use Case. PLoS ONE, 10(2):1–34, February 2015.

S. K¨ohler, B. Ludäscher, and D. Zinn. First-Order Provenance Games. In In Search of Elegance in the Theory and Practice of Computation. Essays Dedicated to Peter Buneman, volume 8000 of LNCS, pp. 382–399. Springer, 2013. Preprint arxiv.org/abs/1309.2655

Slides of presentations