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Paper:

•  Assisting the Discovery and Reuse of Document-based Knowledge using semantic Metadata

I am constantly frustrated that the EU or whoever is so kind as to sponsor research activities does not force the respective institutes to open up the underlying program code of whatever prototypes or tests were developed/conducted as part of their funding obligations.

Rigorous empirical/behavioral research is fine and gay, but the more practical advances in our field require an enormous amount of coding hours. So while I am able to read quite interesting and clever papers on previous research activities the most basic of wheels regarding prototype development have to be reinvented over and over. Even if scientific publications actually reveal the core algorithms used in a  modern (rich) client prototype the complexity of such applications makes rebuilding that piece of software (which is often necessary to actually "go further") far beyond trivial.

Add the fact that quite a bit of the baseline research in IS is performed in a small-group or even individual-closed-closet type of environment and also that those individuals have their own agenda of not spending 12 years on a ph.d. and you end up with an auto-selected choice of individual research scope which is accomplishable using existing open-source libraries/platforms (and therefore far smaller than desirable). This leads to the question of who is helping whom here - shouldn't the open source community benefit from publicly tax-funded research instead of vice versa?

I wont even get started about hype-topics appearing in blogs 1 year before they do in Gartner Hypecycles and 2 years before they do on research conferences, but please please - allow us dwarves to step on the shoulders of other dwarves to accomplish more gigantic tasks.

edit: this rant was kind of spawned by my frustration that  Microsoft Research lets their activity logger  PersonalVibe2 (which they kindly provided - in a compiled form - to the public) rot unusable in Win7/64bit systems even if only a modification of supposedly 5 minutes would be required to make it work again. Of course as a private company MS is free do as they wish and not the real target of the above paragraphs. Still: facepalm.

Management of unstructured Information using semantic Metadata

The amount of unstructured electronic documents in enterprise environments is growing rapidly. The  ConSense project aims to assist the enterprise wide lifecycle management of electronic documents by utilizing the context of document access by knowledge workers. From this context data one can deduct semantic relations among documents and business-domain specific entities which can be combined into a semantic network. Querying the resulting network allows for the discovery and reuse of unstructured documents.

Actual Business Domain

Knowledge workers use, create and collaborate with documents in business processes.

Context Sensors

Client-side software plugins track the context of business-relevant document usage and submit it in condensed form to the central semantic virtualization-store.

Semantic Virtualization

The context information is analyzed using heuristic business-rules resulting in semantic relationships among documents, persons, products, processes and services within the domain.

Task-specific Information

The semantic relationships are used to proactively supply knowledge workers with information and documents related to their actual task-context.

ConSense is a project of the  Department for Information Systems II (Service and Process Management -  Prof. Bodendorf)
 University of Erlangen-Nürnberg
Project contact:  Hinnerk Bruegmann

Student Participation - Master Thesis

• Sauer, Dieter: Automatic Detection of HCI Action Clusters and corresponding Workflow Patterns (Automatische Erkennung von Aktionsclustern und deren Zuordnung zu Workflows)

• Sauer, Dieter: Using Metaanalysis to extract contextual Information from the local File System

• Heckl, Christian: Interaktive Informationsvisualisierung im "Document Lifecycle Management"

• Steininger, Oliver: Erkennung von E-Mail Konversationsfäden (Recognizing Conversation Threads in Email Communication)

Student Participation - Term Papers

• Heckl, Christian; Sauer, Dieter: Unterstützung der Analyse von Informationszusammenhängen durch selektive Visualisierung (Supporting the Analysis of interconnected Information by selective Visualization)

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