During the award ceremony on 04.02.2023, Philipp Hanisch received the Georg Helm Prize 2022 for his Diploma thesis “Indexing for Datalog Materialisation with Leapfrog Triejoin”. The thesis formalizes, discusses, and evaluates challenges and potential solutions of the development of a Datalog system based on the so-called leapfrog triejoin algorithm. In contrast to “traditional” join algorithm, leapfrog triejoin is a multiway join that considers, based on a variable order, all atoms of a Datalog rule with the same variable at the same time. The main focus of the thesis is the indexing of both the given and derived facts, i.e., the way in which these facts should be stored to enable an efficient computation of all derived facts. Thus, the thesis is an important piece for the Datalog system which is under development by the research group for Knowledge-Based Systems.

With the award, Philipp Hanisch joins the Georg Helm Prize winners at ICCL, which already feature the supervisors of the thesis Markus Krötzsch and Anni-Yasmin Turhan. Even though the thesis marks the end of Philipp Hanisch’s studies of computer science and his time as student assistant at ICCL, it is not the end of the collaboration: Philipp Hanisch returned as PhD student and scientific coordinator of SECAI last September.