François Bouillé
Creator of HBDS. Professor at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, where he directed the L.I.S.T.
The work
François Bouillé is the author of HBDS, which he designed between 1975 and 1977 and presented in his doctoral thesis of 1977, followed in 1978 by Hypergraphes et structures de données cartographiques : le système HBDS. The thesis covers both the structuring of computer data and that of spatial and thematic information; that double ambition, computing and earth sciences at once, runs through everything after it.
From HBDS he built outward: a language for abstract data types, ADT'81; a machine-independent storage format, the DSS; a structured expert system, SES, in which a structure carries its own rules. In 1984 he reported running ADT'81 in parallel on a CDC Cyber 205 and inference processing on a Cray-1, early uses of vector supercomputers for non-numerical work. The HBDS page describes these layers.
His published applications are cartography and geodata: a regular at Auto-Carto and Euro-Carto from the late 1970s, a 1979 report on HBDS for the US Air Force, and in 1986 HBDS as the on-board intelligence of a surveying robot. He also taught at the École nationale des sciences géographiques, whose open geomatics course still carries his module on HBDS and his 2007 course on ADL, the Algorithm Description Language.
At Jussieu
In 1975 and 1976 Bouillé publishes from the Laboratoire de tectonophysique and the Institut de programmation of the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris 6. By 1986 he is a professor there and directs the L.I.S.T., the Laboratoire d’Informatique des Sciences de la Terre, tour 25, 4 place Jussieu, and its DESS “Double compétence: informatique appliquée aux sciences de la Terre”. That is where the system was taught as a whole, and where the 1995 polycopié this project rests on comes from. In 2001 he defends the DESS’s “double compétence” label before the ministry, with the École nationale des sciences géographiques as partner; the DESS then becomes the Master 2 IASIG, computing applied to GIS and to the earth sciences, which he heads. He directed 21 doctoral theses between 1985 and 2018, the last two at Paris 6 in 2017 within METIS, the hydrology and geochemistry unit that lists him as a collaborating professor, and the last one at the Université Paris-Est in March 2018. He is professor emeritus. When the L.I.S.T. closed and when he retired is not known.
What I keep of him, in the first person: a man passionate about his work and about passing it on. I had him as a teacher from 1995 to 1998, and the system on these pages was taught with that energy.
Selected bibliography
- Un modèle universel de banque de données, simultanément partageable, portable et répartie. Doctoral thesis, 1977.
- Hypergraphes et structures de données cartographiques : le système HBDS, 1978.
- “The Hypergraph-Based Data Structure: a new approach to data base modelling and application”. In GI, 7. Jahrestagung, Nürnberg, 26-28 September 1977, ed. H. J. Schneider, Informatik-Fachberichte, Springer, pp. 37-55, doi:10.1007/978-3-642-48908-2_3.
- “The HBDS and its application to data structuring and complex system modelling”. Report for the US Air Force, 1979, 167 p.
- “Actual tools for the cartography today”. Euro-Carto I, 1982, pp. 27-32.
- “A structured expert system for cartography based on the HBDS”. Auto-Carto VI, 1983.
- “Parallelism and vectorization with ADT'81 on the Cyber 205”. CDC France, 1984.
- “Inference parallel processing in a data base on a Cray-1”. CCVR, 1984.
- “A structured expert system for geodata banking”. In The role of data in scientific progress, Elsevier, 1984, pp. 417-420.
- “Interfacing cartographic knowledge structures and robotics”. Auto-Carto London, 1986, vol. 1, pp. 563-572.
- “La structuration : le modèle HBDS”. ENSG open course Informatique générale appliquée à la géomatique.
- La formulation simple et rationnelle des algorithmes avec le langage ADL. ENSG course notes, 2007.