AutoFX 2007

Cooperation Partner: automationX

AutomationX provides software and services for designing, managing and visualising industrial processes. In the context of previous projects a large visualisation environment for developing and visualising process images was designed and implemented. The emphasis was on realization of conventional, two-dimensional user-interface methaphors in order to guarantee backward compatibility with already existing products. However important preprocessing measures were already taken for a three-dimensional, immersive process environment. The next principle task is to find appropriate metaphors to port the high information density of process images to three-dimensional visualizations and at the same time to benefit from the spatial information provided by such visualizations.

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Competitive Intelligence

Cooperation Partner: m2n

The management of property rights is highly important due to the significance of the research and development activities in industry.

The patent search returns information which is crucial for the innovation process, making it an integral part of the research and development activity. Patents contain strategic information concerning technology trends and emerging technologies. They represent sources of knowledge for topics surrounding the Competitive Intelligence and for positioning in the area of competition.

On the one hand wrong or incomplete search results are expensive (resulting in unnecessary innovation processes, submission of patents to already existing technologies, etc.), while on the other hand patent search and analysis are themselves time and resource consuming (due to reading time and iterative procedures). Special knowledge is required for assessment of the technical content which results in increased necessity for coordination between the specialized client department and the patent department (provider). There is always a risk of redundantly gathering and compiling knowledge and of not utilizing already acquired knowledge.

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Storage & Retrieval Framework for semantic data

Cooperation Partner: Brockhaus Duden Neue Medien

The range of electronically available products provided by Brockhaus are based on both technologies for efficiently managing a large amount of text and media and complex full-text based search techniques. In the last years the software architecture used in the realization was immensly extended and heterogenised due to numerous activities in the online area. For future activities an increase in the volume of data is expected and furthermore, based on actual trends of market, the integration of semantic structures and appropriate search techniques are expected to play an important role. The project NEO deals with the evaluation, planning and implementation of an alternative software architecture which meets the new requirements optimally. At the same time already existing functionality is homogeneously implemented on a technical level. In the first phase of the project an analysis of existing and new requirements is done. According technologies, products
and libraries are investigated and analysed in order to construct a starting basis for estimating which steps are nescessary for the further course of the project. At the end of this process a decision for a particular implementation type has to be made which consequently also implies an estimation of the expecting costs.

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APA Labs

Cooperation Partner: APA DeFacto

The Austria Presse Agentur (APA) provides a range of services in the area of news media. For example, the generic APA PowerSearch technology provides customers with manifold search facilities, and APA also offers individual information services like press reviews, media feedback and news diffusion analysis.

Although each of these media worlds provides different types of knowledge they are all interrelated by the articles they are based on. Efficient homogenised access possibilities have to be found to enable users of APA DeFacto to benefit from the whole potential of media worlds, with special regard to the specific needs of individual users.
The goal of the project is to create an environment which faciliates fast developing of new access methods and metaphors and where the reactions of the Early Adopter Community can be analyzed with regard to the new access possibilities.

In addition to the develoment of prototypes to standardize the accesses it is also of great importance to establish a community including the necessary technical infrastructure in order to consider different groups of users.

The resultung technical infrastructure should provide an environment similar to a laboratory where the developed prototypes are made available to a selected number of users (Early Adopter) in forms of beta versions.

By analyzing how the users react to the different access possibilities the quality and the usability of the developed prototypes can be estimated and if applicable converted into a quality proof APA DeFacto service. Possible communication media for the community are blogs, forums and wikis.

In addition to the technical challenge of creating such a virtual laboratory, social aspects and group dynamics have to be considered.

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Lexical News Mash-up

Cooperation Partner: APA DeFacto, Brockhaus Duden Neue Medien

The emergence of Web 2.0 and according applications, as for example Google News, has emphasized the trend to combine services in so-called mash-ups. Applications based on mash-ups make data and services originating from multiple providers available to users through a single point of access. The quality of the particular services increases via embedding of useful functions of other providers. Both APA DeFacto and Brockhaus Duden Neue Medien are providers of different but complementory services in the net. While APA DeFacto provides daily news and newspapers, Brockhaus offers detailed information, collected by experts beforehand. The scope of this project is devising, implementiung and evaluating mash-ups which provide users with services based on both partner's contents.

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DYONIPOS - DYnamic Ontologybased Integrated Process Optimisation

Cooperation Partner: FIT-IT

The DYONIPOS mission is to develop context sensitive, intelligent, and agile semantic technologies which provide the basis for significant productivity improvement of knowledge intensive organizations. Agile semantic technologies will enable the uniform handling of structured as well as unstructured business process parts and data, thus supporting two crucial roles a knowledge worker has to fill in a business process oriented environment: Support for process executers in the efficient, standardized but still flexible execution of business processes and support for process engineers in the definition of such standardized processes based on existing work practice.

The process-oriented goal of DYONIPOS is to resolve the dilemma of flexibility for knowledge workers versus organizational needs for standardization and control by supporting the grass roots development and evolution of workflows from ad hoc processes without relinquishing the needed organizational control.Ad hoc processes provide the link between the business process executer and the business process engineer. They consist of defined in- and outputs, but leave the way to accomplish the defined outputs up to the knowledge worker and her specific context.

The technology-oriented goal of DYONIPOS is to develop sophisticated agile semantic technologies which have the power to deal with the multitude of technological challenges involved in the handling of ad hoc processes. The task of process executors will be supported by intelligent proposals of succeeding processes, intelligent information delivery and contextual information extraction facilities. The tasks for process engineers will be supported in semantic analysis and visualisation methods for ad hoc process analysis and the automatic optimization of ad hoc processes based on new optimization algorithms.

DYONIPOS will develop new technology suitable to cope with dynamic and agile organizational environments while still allowing a high level of standardisation and control.

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Brockhaus Planetarium 07

Cooperation Partner: Brockhaus Duden Neue Medien

In 2006 a software component enabling visualisation of astronomical information was developed and integrated into the product ”Brockhaus Multimedial”. This component provides many functions for interactive navigation and exploration of diverse celestial objects. The goal of the project is to extend the existing functionality with with several new features while adressing a number of known issues. In the area of user-interaction new navigation concepts, as for example a scaled overview of objects in the solar system, should be should be designed and implemented. Based on feedback provided by users, positioning of observers at arbitrary locations on Earth, Moon and Mars will be integrated. Precision and capabilities of the underlying computational model will be enhanced to enable simulation of complex astronomical events like occultations and eclipses.

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MyEDB 2007

Cooperation Partner: MAGNA STEYR Fahrzeugtechnik AG & Co KG

Searching within large data sets commonly leads to large result sets because of the large amount of matching documents. This is often exaggerated by fuzzy or imprecise queries and usually lead to a lower user acceptance level.

By adding metadata to the scope of the information retrieval process the quality of a search result can be greatly improved. Especially faceted metadata that provide different distinct views to the document base can be utilized to create results sets that better align with the users expectations. The information contained in these kind of metadata can then also be used as visual guidance for the user to quickly find the most relevant search hits.

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Analysing semantic quality of collectivly created knowledge

Strategic Research Project

A buzzword in the Web 2.0 community is collective intelligence. Folksonomies, i.e., collectively created descriptions of different resources, as well as Wikipedia, an online encyclopaedia, owe their success a huge community that creates and maintains information and knowledge within these existing structures. Naturally, these communities possess a high potential regarding the amount of output in contrast to common editorial offices. However, after the recent emergence of misinformation, the quality of knowledge, that is mostly created by laymen, is questioned.
The objective of the project at hand is the qualitative analysis of collectively created knowledge.
Different approaches, e.g., methods of psychology, have been used to tackle the problem. This project, however, attemps to incorporate well-known algorithms of computer science. Various statistical and mining algorithms are used to analyse the quality of collectively created text passages. Additionally the application of genetic algorithms to simulate the community is conceivable. The idea behind genetic algorithms, i.e., use evolutional strategies to survive, could be advantageous when simulating communities. Thus consequences of collectively created knowledge and the misinformation that is contained in that knowlege might be estimated.
The results of the analysis shall aid to point out alternatives to support and improve knowledge that has been collectively created.

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Graph Mining and visual analysis of graphs

Strategic Research Project

Relations between information objects represent a valuable source of knowledge and information. Special algorithms taking these relations into account, are necessary to exploit this new knowledge.
The application areas are diverse, ranging from ranking of retrieval results to social network analysis, to name a few. The described project is a first step to Knowledge Relationship Discovery and is meant to analyse prospects in this application area.
The objective in this area of research is the developement of methods to explore information spaces that are respresented as graphs. A Ressource Description Framework (RDF) repository can be regarded as an example of an information space. The project sets work on the analysis of possible use cases in order to find potential application areas and to refine the research questions. In addition an overview of possible methods and techniques is developed. Besides mere mining algorithms representation and navigation possibilities in information spaces are to be examined as well. The main issue here is the visual deduction of knowledge carried out by user. For that purpose algorithms that stem from the area of visual analytics are applied. The accuracy, the useability and the application possibilities in dynamic environments serve as evaluation criteria for the implemented techniques.

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Semantic orchestration of knowledge discovery services

Strategic Research Project

The goal of service oriented architectures (SOA) is to provide loose coupled services for an easy usage within applications. The KnowMiner framework has been developed as such a service oriented architecture to provide knowledge discovery tasks as services. However, a problem of SOA’s is the orchestration of services. For complex tasks it is hard to find the correct services and in which order they need to be put together.

To avoid errors during the orchestration process and to provide automatically service chains for solving complex tasks, the usage of semantic technologies is examined. Our goal is to establish a technological infrastructure allowing an easy and efficient orchestration of services using semantic technologies, i.e. OWL-S.
Complex user task should be decomposed into the correct processing steps and assigned to the correct services. This allows users to solve complex tasks without having
detailed knowledge of internal system behaviour.

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LexiScout 2007

Cooperation Partner: Brockhaus Duden Neue Medien

LexiScout is an extension for Internet Explorer and Firefox that was developed in 2006. With LexiScout it is possible to search in selected Brockhaus data sources both - online (e.g. xipolis.net and Brockhaus online) and locally on the user's computer (e.g. Brockhaus Enzyklopädie, Brockhaus Multimedial, Office Bibliothek).

LexiScout leverages the popularity of the search engine Google. During a regular Google search LexiScout

uses the search terms to perform a LexiScout-search and replaces the Google-ADs with LexiScout-results. The benefit for the user is that he gets encyclopaedical information beside the regular search results from Google.

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