For more than 32 years, the dblp computer science bibliography (https://dblp.org) has been providing the computer science community with open, quality-checked, and curated research information. Initially developed by Dr. Michael Ley at the University of Trier, dblp is today operated by Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz Center for Informatics and supports over a million computer scientists worldwide in their daily work. Overall, the databases indexes now more than 8 million indexes international computer science publications from all sub-disciplines of the field.
A festive colloquium will be held on Friday, September 19, 2025, at the University of Trier to celebrate the 32nd anniversary of dblp. The motto, “2^5 years of dblp — 2^23 publications,” is a nod to the tradition in computer science of counting only in powers of two.
The event will also serve as a venue to honor Dr. Michael Ley for his 32 years of dedication to the dblp database throughout his professional career. Dr. Ley grew up in a small bookstore. After obtaining a diploma in computer science from RWTH Aachen University, he went on to earn his doctorate from University of Trier. Since 1993, he has developed dblp from a small and initially highly specialized collection of metadata about scholarly publications in the fields of ‘databases (db)’ and ‘logic programming (lp)’ into the most comprehensive open bibliographic information service for all computer science disciplines. After working on dblp as a one-person project for 18 years, Dr. Ley joined forces with Schloss Dagstuhl LZI in 2011. This eventually led to the formation of a permanent dblp team at Schloss Dagstuhl. Today, dblp is a powerful open scholarly knowledge graph, allowing its users to explore the complex interrelations of the computer science domain and enabling numerous open tools and services with its high-quality data.
As first keynote speaker, Prof. Dr. Kurt Mehlhorn (Max Planck Institute for Computer Science and Saarland University) will talk about “Fair Allocation of Indivisible Goods”. In his talk, Prof. Mehlhorn will discuss various notions of fairness and to what extent fairness can be achieved to allocate a set of indivisible goods – be it a house, a car, or a toothbrush – to a set of a agents. In the second keynote, Prof. Dr. Carole Goble (University of Manchester) will talk about the profound transformation the scholarly communication ecosystem has undergone over the past two decades. Prof. Goble will discuss how we can harness productive resistance to those shifts in the landscape, what role will long-standing initiatives like dblp play in a future dominated by AI, and how we can design open and participatory infrastructures.
For further information and the detailed programme, please see: https://dblp.org/32y