Matteo Francia, an assistant professor at the University of Bologna (Italy), will give an invited talk on “Unified Data Platforms: Challenges and Opportunities in the Era of Heterogeneous Big Data” within the BIS-BDP conference at this year's MIPRO convention. 
 

The increasing digitalization of heterogeneous (big) data is pushing the adoption of more and more complex ecosystems for data collection, processing, and exploitation. Information systems are evolving towards data platforms, ecosystems of composable services that cover the entire data lifecycle. Data platforms act as unified backbones for data exchange where the boundaries between storage, computation, and management are increasingly blurred.

However, several challenges arise, including the design of the platform itself and the need for active metadata to enable multidimensional analytics atop heterogeneous data sources. The talk will provide an overview of these issues and future research opportunities in this dynamic field.

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Matteo Francia is an assistant professor at the University of Bologna (Italy), where he got his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering.

He has published almost 50 papers in international journals and conferences on business intelligence and databases.

His research mainly focuses on multidimensional analytics and data platforms and their applications to mobility data and precision agriculture. He is also interested in querying heterogeneous data sources and enabling efficient interoperability.

He served as co-founder of DATAPLAT (2022-2024) workshops, associate editor for the Data & Knowledge Engineering (DKE journal, and guest editor for several international journals.