Maria Zemankova is a Computer Scientist who is known for the theory and implementation of the first Fuzzy Relational Database System. This research has become important for the handling of approximate queries

Information retrieval

Information retrieval is the area of study concerned with searching for documents, for information within documents, and for metadata about documents, as well as that of searching structured storage, relational databases, and the World Wide Web...

 in databases. She is currently a Program Officer in the Intelligent Information Systems Division at the National Science Foundation

National Science Foundation

The National Science Foundation is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health...

. She is the first (1992) recipient of the SIGMOD

SIGMOD

SIGMOD is the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Management of Data, which specializes in large-scale data management problems and databases....

 Contributions Award for her work in the conception of initiatives in research on scientific databases and digital libraries. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science

Computer science

Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...

 in 1983 from Florida State University

Florida State University

The Florida State University is a space-grant and sea-grant public university located in Tallahassee, Florida, United States. It is a comprehensive doctoral research university with medical programs and significant research activity as determined by the Carnegie Foundation...

for her work on Fuzzy Relational Database Systems.