Mark Roantree's main interests are in the areas of object-oriented databases, object models, and metamodels; federated database systems and architectures; and large scale integration of web sources and XML views.

Dr. Roantree is leader of the Interoperable Systems Group and has obtained numerous research grants, including two Enterprise Ireland strategic research grants in 1998 and 2000, a Research Innovation Grant in 2001; and a Basic Research Grant in 2003 (totalling almost 400,000). These grants funded the OASIS healthcare project; the IOMPAR project, which focuses on storage and secure distribution of software components; the EGTV project, which deals with distributed multimedia databases; and the X-LIM Project, which provides query and metadata services for an infinitely large federation of information systems in a P2P architecture.

The Interoperable Systems Group has collaborations with the Polish Academy of Sciences (Warsaw), Oldenburg University (Germany), Napier University (Scotland), UMIST (England), the University of Montpellier (France), and the University of Ontario (Canada).