Leibniz Center for Informatics in Schloss Dagstuhl
The Center, located in northern Saarland, in the south west of Germany, is dedictated to foster communication between scientists in all areas of informatics. It organizes week-long topic-centered workshops on all themes of Informatics. Each year around 100 such so-called Dagstuhl Seminars are visited by some 3000 researchers from all over the world. Dagstuhl Seminars originate from applications by a small group of scientists. The applications are reviewed by a Scientific Directorate, accepted, their orientation and the included proposed list of participants potentially modified, or they are rejected. The proposers of accepted applications become the organizers of the Seminars and are alone responsible for running them. The center offers everything needed for successful workshops.
The center was founded in 1990 by the Gesellschaft für Informatik (German Society for Informatics), Saarland University and the Universities of Kaiserslautern and Karlsruhe as Internationales Begegnungs- und Forschungszentrum für Informatik (International Conference and Research Center for Informatics) (IBFI) and originally financed by the two German states Saarland and Rhineland-Palatinate. It is located in Wadern, a town in the North of Saarland at the border to Rhineland-Palatinate.
Schloss Dagstuhl (Dagstuhl castle) is a late baroque mansion built in the 1750s. It is a successor building of a fortified castle on top of the neighboring hill built in the 13th century and taken down in the first half of 18th century.
Schloss Dagstuhl was inherited by a nuns’ order when the last member of the owner family de Lasalle-von Louisenthal died. This order sold the building to the Saarland when the Gesellschaft for Informatik searched a place to establish a meeting place for Informatics researchers. The model for the Center was the Mathematische Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach (Mathematics Research Center) in the Black Forest region. This world-famous conference center was established in 1944 and has won a reputation as a breeding place for mathematical results and breakthroughs.
The IBFI was evaluated by the German National Research Council, accepted into the Leibniz Society and renamed into Leibniz Zentrum für Informatik (LZI) (Leibniz Center for Informatics). From then on it received funding from the Federal and the German State governments.
Besides running the Dagstuhl Seminars, the LZI maintains the dblp bibliography of Informatics literature and publishes high-quality conference proceedings and scientific journals in an open-access scheme.
