The world's largest computing society, the Association for Computer Machinery (ACM), has bestowed its prestigious ACM Distinguished Service Award 2019 on computer scientist Dr. Michael Ley of Schloss Dagstuhl Leibniz-Center for Informatics and of Trier University. ACM thus recognizes Dr. Ley's achievement in the creation and unceasing editorial curation of the dblp computer science bibliography.
Dr. Ley has developed dblp from a small and initially highly specialized collection of metadata about scholarly publications in the fields of "data bases (db) and logic programming (lp)" into the most comprehensive, open bibliographic information service for all disciplines of computer science. The database was created by Dr. Ley at the University of Trier in 1993. Today, it is operated by Dr. Ley and his dblp team at Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik and it indexes more than 5 million scholarly articles, monographs, and collections from the field of computer science.
The dblp service at https://dblp.org is highly popular with computer scientists all over the world: About every 1.5 seconds someone starts a new session with dblp. During peak times dblp's servers answer more than 100 requests per second. The service is particularly appreciated for its accuracy and its ability to distinguish between authors with the same name.
Dr. Michael Ley grew up in a small bookstore. After a diploma in computer science from RWTH Aachen, he went on to receive his doctorate from the University of Trier. For 27 years now, Dr. Michael Ley has been shaping the development of dblp. Dr. Ley's contributions through dblp have already been honored in previous years, for example with the ACM Special Interest Group on Management of Data (SIGMOD) Contributions Award in 2003.
Background:
The dblp computer science bibliography is the premier online open bibliographic data base and search engine on computer science publications. dblp supports computer scientists all over the world by providing open access to high-quality bibliographic metadata and hyperlinks to the electronic editions of publications. The database has received funding from various sources over the years, such as the German Federal Ministry of Research and Education, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation, DFG), Microsoft Research, the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, and the Klaus Tschira Foundation. Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik has been providing the lion share of the resources to dblp since 2011. In November 2018 it took over complete responsibility for dblp, thus ensuring stable permanent operation.
Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik is part of the Leibniz Association, which represents about 100 leading German non-university research institutes and scientific infrastructures. Because of their national importance, the federal government and the state governments jointly fund the institutes of the Leibniz Association.
