Data and Knowledge Engineering has been an active research area in the department since the 1980's, when extensive works were conducted on projects regarding distributed databases and deductive databases. Currently the frontier directions in this area: (1) New Database Query Paradigms, (2) High Performance Data Mining for Complex Data, and (3) Semantic Web Technology.

Since 2005, in this area over 30 high quality papers have been published in global top conferences and journals such as SIGMOD, SIGKDD, VLDB, ICDE, WWW, TKDE, and VLDB. The funded projects in this area include 11 from the Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), 2 from the National Basic Research Program of China (the 973 Program), 4 from National 863 High-Tech Program, 8 from industry, and 22 from international cooperation.

Faculty members in this area have extensive connections with their international counterparts. In last five years, they were invited over 50 times to attend as PC members for major international conferences, and 6 times to serve as PC chairs or conference chairs. Two of them currently serve as editing board members for 2 international journals. In 2007, as a major organizer acting as the general co-chair, the database group from the department organized the ACM SIGMOD/PODS Conference in Beijing.