"Athena" is the first research center in Greece with a focus exclusively on Information Society. Established in Athens in 2003, it is a research and technology organization supervised by the General Secretariat for Research and Technology of the Ministry of Education, Lifetime Learning and Religion. IMIS was founded in 2007 with the mission to conduct research in the area of data management and large-scale information systems.

IMIS is directed by Timos Sellis, Professor at the National Technical University of Athens. The IMIS team comprises a healthy mix of senior and junior researchers and engineers. Junior members are actively supported in pursuing new lines of research and education.

The research at IMIS has a strong collaborative aspect, and ranges from basic to applied research. The collaborative aspect is expressed in that research is conducted with national and international partners from industry as well as academia, often also in the context of novel and innovative projects.

• IMIS Annual Activity Report for 2009 (in greek)

• to conduct research, develop applications, and to provide services in the areas of information management and large-scale information systems (research focus),
• to conduct research within the scope of instituted research programs and respective research projects (project orientation),
• to transfer resulting technologies to companies in the e-business, e-government, and e-learning domain (technology transfer),
• to prototype, develop, and test simulation platforms for large scale systems (benchmarking),
• to certify software products (certification), and
• to perform tests and comparisons of new technologies and innovative services (studies).

• to base its research on the principles of Excellence and to play a strategic role in the shaping of the Information Society at the national and international level (excellence in research),
• to conduct interdisciplinary research and cooperation with disciplines beyond the boundaries of traditional aspects of information management (interdisciplinary),
• to establish international cooperations in research and development (international cooperation), and
• to accelerate technology transfer and exploitation of research results with respect to products (collaboration with industry) by entering strategic alliances with industry at the national and international level, creating spin offs, affecting industrial practices through cooperation with high-tech industries, and by being a catalyst for the development of new activities in the public and private sector.

The IMIS main areas of interest are:

• Distributed Information Systems and Web Information Systems, with focus on scalability and efficiency issues.
• Information integration, interoperability of information systems, semantic Web and ontology management.
• Business and Database intelligence systems, with focus on implementation and optimization.
• Management of geographical information, with focus on spatial and spatiotemporal data management techniques.
• Scientific databases and Digital Libraries, with focus on biological / environmental data management, and data preservation and provenance.