Our core competencies are reflected in the conducted projects in the years ('01, '02, '03, '04, '05, '06, '07, '08). In these projects we have covered projects in the field of knowledge management, e-learning, integrating working and learning, and business-process-oriented knowledge infrastructures.
Lifelong Learning has become an essential ingredient for success within our knowledge society. The EU project APOSDLE develops a software platform and tools to support you to learn @ work: Learn within the context of your immediate work and within your current work environment. The new Advanced Process- Oriented Self- Directed Learning Environment will provide you with practical guidance, learning content and expert advice when you need it and where you need it.
APOSDLE is a 48 months research and development integrated project partially supported by the European Community under the Information Society Technologies (IST) priority of the 6th framework programme for R&D.
APOSDLE – new ways to work, learn and collaborate! read more...
EU-Project, Associate Partner, Research Parner: IWM (TU Graz), Duration: April 2008 - March 2012
MATURE is a large scale Integrated Project partially funded under framework 7 of the European Union. The project brings together 12 leading research and development partners from the field of technology enhanced learning from five European countries. The Know-Center participates in this project as an associated partner. The Knowledge Management Institute of Graz University of Technology is involved as a full partner.
Project Abstract: The agility of organizations has become the critical success factor for competitiveness and requires that companies and their employees together and mutually dependently learn and develop their competencies efficiently. Failures of organisation-driven approaches to technology-enhanced learning and the success of community-driven approaches in the spirit of Web 2.0 have shown that for that agility we need to leverage the intrinsic motivation of employees to engage in collaborative learning activities, and combine it with a new form of organisational guidance. For that purpose, MATURE conceives individual learning processes to be interlinked (the output of one learning process is input to the other) in a knowledge-maturing process in which knowledge changes in nature. This knowledge can take the form of classical content in varying degrees of maturity, but also involves tasks and processes or semantic structures. The goal of MATURE is to understand this maturing process better, and to build tools and services to reduce maturing barriers.
MATURE’s outcome will be
MATURE builds on a participatory design methodology, involving companies inside and outside the consortium in an iterative development process. read more...
Cooperation Partners: Hyperwave, Graz und Utomi, München
A key concept for the future knowledge desktop is the realization of flexible knowledge architectures based on the agility of services. Service oriented architectures (SOA) realize technical functionality by providing services for various tasks. Instead of having a statically wired set of components in the monolithic system, services provide the additional benefit of better encapsulation, independency, loose coupling and decentralism.
The project’s results are two surveys: in the first survey service-based architectures and technologies as well as business models for software as a service are investigated. The second survey analyses use cases for services of a search engine. A gain in knowhow and preparation for future development work can be seen as the project’s benefits.
Cooperation Partners: Concept Data Systems, Graz und Dynamic Media, Graz
This project dealt with the ever increasing dynamics in organizational knowledge sources and structures. The project addressed two issues: First, authoring of content or engineering of knowledge structures is increasingly moved away from professional editors or knowledge engineers to domain experts in organizations who need to quickly convey small pieces of knowledge. Second, the selection and presentation of learning content is very strongly related to the concrete actual working context of a person.
In this project two software systems have been implemented. (1) a system, which strongly considers the current working context of a person when selecting and presenting content to her. (2) a system, which allows users to produce content without an extra effort and enriches content semantically. A gain in efficiency caused when applying the two software systems within organisations is the key benefit of this project’s results.
Cooperation Partners: ISN, Graz und Bravestone, Graz und edicos, München
The objective of this project was to develop, implement and roll out a working Web2.0 prototype of a community-based innovation services platform. Focus of these services is to offer contextualized information, people recommender services and contextualized collaboration services for community members. Additionally, the community shall be able to provide their feedback in a least-possible invasive manner.
The project had two results:
Partners benefitted from the project’s results in that they could integrate the system (consisting of software, services, community and data) into their own business activities. The Know-Center benefitted from its gain in development know-how and the establishment of a sound basis of services and data.
Cooperation Partners: TDSP/I2F
Over the last years TDSP/I2F had introduced an eLearning system, which enhanced their existing comprehensive training offerings. This system offered traditional eLearning services such as learner management, content provision, and discussion forums. During the course of this project the system was technically enhanced by means of additional services (e.g. blogs, web-casts).
The project’s result is a prototype of a learning system, which consists of content, media, web-based technology and a teaching concept, of which the latest has been developed in close cooperation between the project partners.
Cooperation Partners: Hyperwave, Graz und Utomi, München
In recent times technologies, which boost online collaboration among employees, became more important in corporation life. The understanding of these motives, terms and conditions form an important requirement to adopt social networking tools. Therefore the understanding of social networking can be further developed. Particularly with regard to Communities it is of interest to react to new developments and to take measures at an early stage.
In this project it is one ambition to identify the most important parameters of a successfully driven knowledge community under real-life conditions. The findings about social networking-approaches and -tools made there, will be translated into different communities and transferred into the project. Additionally it is of special interest to investigate the relationship between community members in the real world as well as virtual world. Results of this investigation will be utilised in this project to benefit real and virtual Communities.
Strategic Project, Cooperation Partners: INM Joanneum Research, ISS Joanneum Research
In social tagging environments, users contribute content (news, blogs, pictures, videos, scientific articles etc.) and tag content contributed by themselves or others. The resulting data structures, connecting users, tags and content, are called foksonomies. The idea of the Semantic Web is to describe web content in an unambiguous and machine-readable manner. To reach this goal, the richness of data available as folksonomies, and the partly-structured character of folksonomic data can be exploited.
This project deals with both: Web2.0, characterised by massive user contributions, on the one hand, and semantic technologies and picture analyses methods on the other. Concrete results of this project are:
Strategic Project, Cooperation Partners: TU Graz
The term “user context” is used to describe a user’s computational environment (e.g. current task, recently opened documents, work environment). User contexts are formally described with ‘user context models’ and stored in ‘user profiles’. User context may be utilized in context based retrieval, context-aware applications or location-based services. Results from this project shall serve as one basis for efforts undertaken to implement and introduce ‚intelligent context-sensitive services’.
Currently, work has been carried out in the following fields: detection of user context data and integration of frameworks and applications from further research projects of the Know-Center.
So called sensors serve to detect user context data. In the first half of 2008, a User Context Service has been developed, which integrates a number of sensors and stores detected data in the flexible semantic web data format RDF. The service and the sensors were evaluated with respect to its actual feasibility and applicability in the second half of 2008. Furthermore experiments were carried out to discover the aspects of the user’s context that are significant for specific tasks of users and to study whether these tasks can automatically be detected based on the user’s context.
Technological frameworks, which have been developed in further (and past) research projects oft he Know-Center, shall also be integrated with the User Context Service and the sensors. Currently, the integration exists as a concept but not as a functioning implementation. In the very next step, the integration shall be established via a Web Service-based interface.
Cooperation Partners: Semantic Web Company
It is one of the strategic goals of the Know-Center to introduce newest knowledge management developments to its partners as well as to Austrian Industry in general. This is also the goal of the present project. From the close and intensive cooperation with its partners the Know-Center concludes topics which are relevant for industry. For providing a preferably broad group with interesting findings, a Weblog was chosen as the appropriate information transfer instrument. There editorially prepared content regarding topics such as Knowledge Discovery or Technology Enhanced Learning is provided. It is mostly taken form industrially relevant reports and interviews with Know-Center partners. The second main instrument for information transfer is TRIPLE-I where partners give insight in their current knowledge management activities.
Strategic Project
The present strategic research project is a cross-section project which prepares results that are relevant for all other Web 2.0 related technological or conceptual activities at the Know-Center. Its focus is on monitoring web 2.0 trends, evaluations and the systematic classification of web 2.0 applications in enterprises. In 2008 evaluations of communities, Wikis/Weblogs in enterprises and Web 2.0 portals were planned and realised. Moreover, a methodology for classifying Web 2.0 case studies was developed and presented in a book appearing parallel to TRIPLE-I. The monitoring of trends as well as continuous publications in scientifically and industrially relevant media is part of daily work.