Professor Wim Martens is one of several award winners. This year’s Alonzo Church Award recognizes a body of foundational work on logical languages for querying graph data. Martens’ research on theoretical concepts in the area have had an exceptional impact: within a decade, they were incorporated into two international ISO standards, namely the SQL extension SQL/PGQ and the native graph query language GQL. This rapid transfer from theory into global standards is highly unusual and highlights the relevance of the research.
Graph databases are a new key technology in modern data processing and are widely used by major companies such as Oracle, Amazon, Google, SAP, and Neo4j. The awarded work provides the formal foundations to query both graph structure and data simultaneously and to analyze complex properties of paths of arbitrary length. These capabilities are essential for many applications, including fraud detection, social networks, knowledge graphs, supply chain management, systems biology, and drug discovery.
Earlier versions of these publications had already received test-of-time awards, acknowledging their impact. The Alonzo Church Award now further emphasizes their significance and their remarkably fast adoption in practice.
The award is endowed with 1,500 US dollars plus travel and conference expenses, but its main value lies in its international prestige. With Wim Martens among the laureates, the University of Bayreuth once again demonstrates its strength in theoretical computer science and its contribution to research that directly shapes future technological standards. Prof. Martens was recently also given a SIGMOD Research Highlight Award for outstanding work in databases research.
