Dr. Ralf Hartmut Güting is (since 1989) a full professor in computer science at the University
of Hagen, Germany. He received his Diplom and Dr. rer. nat. degrees from the University of Dortmund in 1980 and 1983, respectively, and became a professor at that university in 1987. From 1981 until 1984 his main research area was Computational Geometry. After a one-year stay at the IBM Almaden Research Center in 1985, extensible
and spatial database systems became his major research interests. His group has built a prototype of an extensible spatial DBMS, the Gral-System. He is the author of two (German) text books on data structures/algorithms and on compilers and has published about 50 articles in computational geometry and database systems. He is also an associate
editor of the ACM Transactions on Database Systems and an editor of GeoInformatica.
His major current research interests are extensible database architecture and moving objects databases.
