Daniel Kimmig

Considerations about the implementation of a public knowledge base regarding nanotechnology

Nanotechnology ranks among the key technologies that will bring fundamental changes to basic research, many industry sectors and daily life. However, consumers often miss reliable and understandable information on nanomaterials. To create this transparency, the DaNa project collects and evaluates the latest scientific literature before publishing these on the website www.nanoobjects.info. Though all published articles are designed to meet the needs of different recipient groups, a certain knowledge about nanomaterials is presumed due to the nanomaterial-specific structuring of the website. This poses a barrier for interested laymen who usually have a particular nano-related application in mind. These application-oriented facts on nanomaterials already exist on the website but are scattered throughout the different articles. To overcome this, we first analyzed the state of the scattered information and then assessed requirements for a new tool displaying these facts: storage of extracted knowledge in a homogenous way, visualization options and integration of the new database into the existing content management system. We therefore extended our backend to capture knowledge on a semantically higher level in a database called DaNaVis. Based on this database we can increase the accessibility of DaNas project results by means of interactive visualization components.

The SMARTLAM 3D-I Concept: Design of Microsystems from Functional Elements Fabricated by Generative Manufacturing Technologies

Generative manufacturing technologies are gaining more and more of importance as key enabling technologies in future manufacturing, especially when a flexible scalable manufacturing of small medium series of customized parts is required. The paper describes a new approach for design and manufacturing of complex three dimensional components building on a combination of additive manufacturing and e-printing technologies, where the micro component is made up of stacks of functionalized layers of polymer films. Special attention will be paid to the “3-d” modeling approach, requested to support the applicaton developer through provision of design rules for this integrated manufacturing concept . Both, the application concept as well as the related equipment and manufacturing integration currently are currently developed further in the project SMARTLAM, funded by the European Commission.

Search and Graphical Visualization of Concepts in Document Collections Using Taxonomies

The main idea of this paper is the search for semantic concepts in documents using taxonomies. The concepts to discover are represented by general taxonomy trees which can be combined to express more sophisticated concepts. The proposed algorithm allows the ranking of documents according to the relevance of the queried concepts as well as a graphical representation of the detected concepts inside a document based on a quantified version of the taxonomy trees.