The story
History
The German Informatics Society was founded in Bonn, Germany, on September 16, 1969. Initially aimed primarily at researchers, it expanded in the mid-1970s to include computer science professionals, and in 1978 it founded its journal Informatik Spektrum to reach this broader audience.
The Deutsche Informatik-Akademie in Bonn was founded in 1987 by the German Informatics Society in order to provide seminars and continuing education for computer science professionals. In 1990, the German Informatics Society contributed to the founding of the International Conference and Research Center for Computer Science (renamed since as the Leibniz Center for Informatics) at Dagstuhl; since its founding, Schloss Dagstuhl has become a major center for international academic workshops.
In 1983, the German Informatics Society became a member society of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP), taking over the role of representing Germany from the Deutsche Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Rechenanlagen. In 1989, it joined the Council of European Professional Informatics Societies.
Structure and history
The biennial BTW conference series started in 1985 in Karlsruhe with 320 participants. Since then it has been held every two years at German and Swiss universities. It can be seen as the GI's counterpart to the ACM SIGMOD and CIKM conferences. Although it is an international conference with English as the conference language, it is mainly aimed at German-speaking groups and is considered to be the most important conference in the field of database systems in the German-speaking area.
The conference itself consists of a research and industrial programme including presentations or demonstrations of the papers published in the conference proceedings. At the conference, the DBIS group awards several prizes, including the prize for the best dissertation in Database and Information Systems and the prizes for the best papers. Several workshops will be held in conjunction with the conference.
From Wikipedia’s article on German Informatics Society, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5