Distributed information systems lie at the crossroad of database systems, distributed systems, networking, and knowledge engineering. Due to the success of the Internet and the World-Wide Web, experts with a good combination of skills in these domains are both highly sought by companies as well as needed by research institutions to progress science. These requirements define the motivation behind my previous teaching assignments: To interest people in interdisciplinary thinking and equip them with the necessary skills to design practical solutions meeting real-world requirements, or enable them to come up with new and interesting research, if they decide to go for a scientific career.

For distributed information systems courses with a focus on the data aspects, I consider the following topics relevant (non-exclusive list): classical database theory (E-R model, database design, transactions), semi-structured data (XML, RDF, Semantic Web), distributed data management (data/schema fragmentation, distributed transaction processing, mobile data management, overlay networks), Internet andWeb technologies (setting up and
running Web information systems, Web services, search engines, protocols), information retrieval and data mining (text indexing, association rule mining, classification), ontologies, data integration, knowledge representation (with specific focus on semi-structured and Web information).

If the focus should be more on the distributed systems and networking
aspects, then the following topics must be taught (non-exclusive list): distributed system models, networking and internetworking (types of networks, network principles, congestion control, Internet protocols and routing, Ethernet, WiFi, Bluetooth), security, distributed file systems, name services, time and global state, coordination and agreement, distributed transactions, replication and group communication, peer-to-peer systems, mobile
and ubiquitous computing, data broadcasting in mobile networks, web services.

(Manfred Hauswirth, 2014)