VENUS - Design of socio-technical networking applications in situative ubiquitous computing systems

January 2010 - December 2012

VENUS is a research cluster at the interdisciplinary Research Center for Information System Design (ITeG) at Kassel University, funded by the State of Hesse as part of the program for excellence in research and development (LOEWE).

Many areas of private and personal life are already pervaded by IT applications. The Internet has become a part of everyday life for many people. More and more mobile phones allow high-speed Internet access. Social networks have influenced the nature of connections between people and will continue to enrich our lives with new forms of communication, coordination and interaction. The computerization and networking of everyday life is progressing continuously and rapidly.

The visionary Mark Weiser wrote: Ubiquitous computing technologies “weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it”. Thus, the provision and processing of information will be part of the surrounding infrastructure. Information and services will be ubiquitously available. The technology moves into the background and offers customized services adapted to the needs of the user.

From a technical perspective, ubiquitous computing (UC) leads to context-aware applications that adapt dynamically to their runtime environment in order to provide the user with services that are tailored to the particular situation. Hence, ubiquitous computing and self-adaptivity go hand in hand. This implies a variety of technical and non-technical consequences. The ubiquitous availability of services and the associated self-adaptation of applications create new challenges that clearly are not only technical in nature.

The goal of VENUS is to explore the design process of future networked, ubiquitous systems, which are characterized by situation awareness and self-adaptive behavior. The project will explore and extend the foundations of such systems and will in particular develop a design methodology that supports the development of socially acceptable ubiquitous computing applications, i.e. applications that not only satisfy the functional requirements but also comply with the given user requirements in terms of usability, trust, legal regulations and so on. Thus, VENUS focuses on the interactions between the new technology, the individual user and the society. The long-term goal of VENUS is the creation of a comprehensive interdisciplinary development methodology for the design of ubiquitous computing systems.

Commune - Detection of Groups of Interest in Collaborative Tagging Systems

January 2010 - June 2011

The amount of available information exponentially increases with the change towards the information society. Formerly aspired archetypes of omniscient knowledge holders are superseded by the ability to quickly find and access world wide instantly available information. Scholars at schools and universities experience that it is not necessary to know everything, but to know where to find the information needed, which manifests in the colloquial phrase of "googling" for information.

This leads to the central problem that no single person is able to survey today's oversupply of information. Therefore, information is preselected and presorted prior access and perception. This gives rise to the question, who pre-processes information. Central and intransparent information preselection forms the worst case from a democratic point of view, as it gives place to politically motivated censorship (e.g., Google-Censorship in china).

Opposed to central information provision, in the "Web 2.0" information are provided and retrieved according to democratic principles. Each individual may provide, review and tag knowledge. But this gives raise to many new problems. A sociologist, e.g., searches with other expectations for the tag "migration" than a computer scientist, and reviews of the one may be irrelevant or even misleading for the other. Such a distinction of individuals not only depends on profession. As manifold a society is, as manifold are the groups of interests it comprises. Based on generated, reviewed and accessed information, technical methods for automatically detecting groups of interests can be engineered. Such methods may then be used for providing interest weighted views on the stored and managed knowledge base. Even preferences and interests of fringe groups which otherwise would be marginalized out as statistical outliers may be accounted.

The Hertie Chair for Knowledge & Data Engineering runs the collaborative publication and bookmark sharing and tagging system BibSonomy. Researchers and students use the system for providing and accessing information but it also serves as a testbed for new methods of presenting and pre-processing information. Next, new methods for automatically detecting groups of interests will be developed and tested. This especially gives rise to new views on the literature which is managed by BibSonomy, but will be generally applicable to other systems. This supports research and teaching, as bibliographies related to a specific field which are commonly provided by single lecturers are superseded by a selection rating of literature based on a corresponding group of interest. A student new to a certain field of research may therefor search well-directed for appropriate literature.

In the context of this research project, new algorithms for detecting groups of interests in collaborative tagging systems will be developed and evaluated. Existing methods have to be adopted to new data structures and new methods developed accordingly. Different methods have to by evaluated objectively. As there are no gold-standards for groups of interests in collaborative tagging systems, new measures for assessing the quality of a given partition in groups of interests have to be developed. The best methods for detecting groups of interests will be implemented in BibSonomy and evaluated in a live setting.

PUMA - Academic Publication Management

August 2009 - July 2011

Even though many researchers consider the open access idea important, the concrete positioning of content in institutional repositories (IR) often fails due to the fact that - from the authors' perspective - the effort of data entry is not accompanied by direct benefits. In this DFG project the IR-input will therefore be integrated into the work processes of the scientist, who can - at the same time - position the publication he has created in the university research report, update the list of publications on his website and transfer the entry to a cooperative publication management system.

The input is also supported by automatically gathering and offering metadata from different data sources (Sherpa Romeo list, OPAC, Library networks, cooperative publication management systems) at the time of entering the data. For this integration a unique digital author identification (DAI) will be introduced in the project. The PUMA platform will be developed as a showcase of the open access repository platform DSpace and will be connected to the library system PICA and the cooperative publication management system BibSonomy. The system is open for adjustment "out of the box" to other popular IR software, university research reports and university bibliographies. The results will be made available to other libraries as open source software.

Informational Self-Determination in the Web 2.0

April 2009 - September 2010

The new generation of the internet ( "Web 2.0" or "social internet") is characterized by a very liberal provision of information through the users. Against this background, this DFG project's goal is to explore and to shape the opportunities and risks of the new Web2.0 technologies in a selected scenario and in close interaction between scientists and lawyers.

After a review of the situation and subsequently the creation of medium-term scenarios, the project will analyze the technical and legal opportunities and risks related to typed roles. Generic concepts will be developed for the design of applications complying with data protection law (identity management, avoidance of personal reference and educational profile, responsibilities). Honouring these concepts, algorithms and procedures for two specific tasks will be developed: Recommender systems for cooperative tagging systems and collaborative spam detection methods for such systems. They are evaluated using real data. The most successful approaches will be implemented in the collaborative publication management system BibSonomy and will be evaluated in the current operation. Finally, it will be analyzed to which extent, on account of the new complex of problems of Web 2.0, dogmatics and interpretation of data protection law have to be modified, and if possibly legislative activities are necessary or advisable.

WebZubi - Ein Web2.0-Netzwerk zur Gestaltung innovativer Berufsausbildung für gewerblich-technische Auszubildende

April 2009 - March 2012

Development of ontology learning methods and evaluation of the Webzubi platform

The Web 2.0 provides excellent prospects for an improvement of apprenticeship by using interactive communication and learning platforms. Up to now the new elements of the Web 2.0 are not used in the project partners' training management. To increase motivation and thereby the quality of education of commercial-technical apprentices, a new Web 2.0 platform shall be implemented. Target audience are commercial-technical apprentices from DB Mobility Logistics AG and associated partners. This pilot project reaches more than 3,000 commercial-technical apprentices altogether. With the help of Web 2.0 technologies, the apprentices shall be prepared for the increasing interoperation in professional life. The challenge for the University of Kassel in this BMBF financed project is the development of semantics-based navigation and recommendation components.

Industry Project with K+S IT-Services GmbH

Since March 2005

Investigation and implementation of search engines with K+S IT-Services GmbH

Publikations-Reporting bei SAP Research

Since 2008

SAP Research setzt das vom Fachgebiet Wissensverarbeitung betriebene kooperative Publikationsverwaltungssystem BibSonomy für das interne Publikations-Reporting ein.

Publikationsmanagement bei der Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft

Since

Das kooperative Publikationsverwaltungssystem BibSonomy des Fachgebiets Wissensverarbeitung wird vom Fraunhofer-Institut für Intelligente Analyse- und Informationssysteme für das interne Publikations-Reporting eingesetzt.

Completed Projects

TAGora - Semiotic Dynamics in Online Social Communities

June 2006 - August 2009

Our research group is a member of the EU project TAGora. The focus of the project is the investigation of WEB2.0 applications, which enable users to create user specific contents themselves.

Novel user structures emerge through the mapping of social structures in the internet, differing from data models wich have been investigated so far. Aspects are the appearance of semiotic relations and their development over time. In order to investigate and develop approaches and solutions for models and analysis methods, collaboration is carried out in the interdisciplinary context.

Research partners are: University of Roma (La Sapienza), Sony CSL, University of Koblenz-Landau and University of Southampton.

NEPOMUK - Networked Environment for Personalized, Ontology-based Management of Unified Knowledge

January 2006 - December 2008

As a member of the research centre L3S Hanover we take part in the EU project NEPOMUK. The aim of this project is to extend the computer desktops by semantic abilities in order to improve the collaboration and exchange of information within and between the working groups. Vision is the "Social Semantic Desktop" which unites the abilities of the semantic web with those of social network analysis (SNA).

Within a consortium of researchers, industry and a growing community the research area knowledge engineering deals in particular with the discovery and structurization of communities and in this connection examines methods from the field of SNA. Thus, relations between users, resources and meta data are used to recognize users with similar interests. This shall improve the exchange of knowledge between users unknown to each other.

Microsoft Social Search

June 2006 -

Through the assignment of tags to relevant resources (e.g. URLs), folksonomies allow an individual categorization of one's own knowledge, and at the same time collective use of the gathered data. Despite the tags' function of giving a rough preview, which may be used for navigation and orientation within the huge amount of data, a systematic search as known from conventional search engines for the World Wide Web, offers a reasonable completion/extension for information retrieval. For this reason the project, which is supported by a Microsoft award, investigates the implementation and further development of methods based on link popularity as regards the tripartite structure of the folksonomy. In addition to facilitating a "ranked" search for information, a comparison of the amounts of information as well as the users' behaviour e.g. regarding trend discovery can be accomplished.

KDubiq - Knowledge Discovery in Ubiquitous Environments

December 2005 - May 2008

KDubiq is the first Coordination Action (CA) for Ubiquitous Knowledge Discovery, 100% funded by the European Union under IST (Information Society Technology), FET Open (Future and Emerging Technologies) in the 6th Framework Programme under the number IST-6FP-021321. We are actively involved as a chair of the working group 4 (WG4).

The purpose of this working group is to investigate possible data types for ubiquitous KDD systems and elaborate an overview on the current state of the art in representing and processing data in ubiquitous knowledge discovery applications with a particular focus on Web 2.0 mining and sensor networks.

PROLEARN - Technology Enhanced Professional Learning

April 2004 - December 2007

Our research group is a member of the PROLEARN Network of Excellence financed by the IST (Information Society Technology) programme of the European commission dealing with technology enhanced professional learning. Our mission is to bring together the most important research groups in the area of professional learning and training, as well as other key organisations and industrial partners, thus bridging the currently existing gap between research and practical experience in this area.

PROLEARN's goal is to achieve a greater focus on questions of European importance and a better integration of research efforts. Therefore PROLEARN will initiate and improve cooperations between various actors of academia and industry in the area of technology enhanced learning.

COMO - COncepts and MOdels

December 2005 - November 2007

COMO project is a German-Russian cooperation for the investigation of conceptual structures and structures of abstract models within knowledge engineering. Proposals for a conceptual reorganization of the logic as regards practical utilization are to be linked with efforts as for abstract models, in order to being able to solve open questions regarding the pragmatical application of current algebraic-logic theories.

On the one hand the practical problems of communication associated with the use of different semantics (ontologies) are of particular importance. On the other hand, problems of granularity at system descriptions in connection with modal and temporal logic are investigated with general conceptions developed in the conceptual system theory.

PADLR - Personalized Access to Distributed Learning Resources

The research unit Knowledge and Data Engineering of the University of Kassel is partner in the Research Center L3S and works there on a module of the project Personalized Access to Distributed Learning Resources (PADLR), where it develops a so-called Courseware Watchdog. This serves to find teaching materials in the WWW or P2P-network Edutella, Edutella and to present it to the user.

Learning material can be collected with the help of an ontology-based focused Webcrawler and by connecting to the P2P-network Edutella. Subjective Clustering extends well-known algorithms with ontology based background knowledge and permits thus the description of preferences and production of subjective views. A visualization based on Formal Concept Analysis offers intelligent browsing capabilities. Strategies for ontology evolution make it possible to reflect modifications within the ontology which are in the interest of the learner.

KDNet - Knowledge Discovery Network of Excellence

February 2002 - December 2004

KDNet is an open network of participants from science, industry and administration. The principal purpose of this international project is the integration of problems from the business everyday life in research discussions and co-operation regarding the future of Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. The project is promoted by the European Commission as Framework of Excellence in the 5th Master program and runs since February 2002.