3 A common core of concepts for informatics majors Focus group Doris Lidtke (USA; chair), Paul Myers (USA; rapporteur), Lillian Cassel (USA), Gopal Gupta (AUS), Anneke Hacquebard (NL), Fred Mulder (NL), Sigrid Schubert (FRG), Diane Schwartz (USA), Nobumasa Takahashi (J), Henk van Leeuwen (NL) and Stanislaw Waligorski (PL) Abstract The core concepts of informatics can be located in the intersection of the core concepts of the constituting and amalgamating fields of computer science, information systems, software engineering and computer engineering. In this focus group paper we present a core of both concepts and skills in eleven categories, ranging from information modelling, formalism and system design to social/ethical implications and (inter)personal skills. Keywords Informatics, informatics majors, curriculum (core) 1 INTRODUCTION The broad field of informatics has increasingly been defined to be an amalgamation of the fields of computer science (CS), information systems (IS), software engineering (SE), and computer engineering (CE). Informatics may be seen then as computing in a very general sense. Yet though the term is in fairly wide use, there has been given no attention to those core concepts of informatics that would be essential for the development of relevant curricula. By its very definition, we see that the core concepts of informatics are in the intersection of the core concepts of CS, IS, SE and CE, respectively. Informatics in Higher Education F. Mulder & T. van Weens (Eds.) © 1998 IFIP. Published by Chapman & Hall