Data and Knowledge Engineering has been an active research area in the department since 1980's, when extensive works were conducted on projects of distributed database and deductive database. Currently the frontier directions in this area of the department cover: (1) New Database Query Paradigm, (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 on world top conferences and journals such as SIGMOD, SIGKDD, VLDB, ICDE, WWW conferences, and TKDE, VLDB Journals etc. 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 as PC member for major international conferences, and 6 times as PC chair or conference chair. Two of them currently serve as editing board member for 2 international journals. In 2007, as a major organizer acting as the general co-chair, demo-chair etc., the database group from the department organized the ACM SIGMOD/PODS Conference in Beijing.