Klaus Tochtermann

The Web 2.0 way of learning with technologies

While there is a lot of hype around various concepts associated with the term Web 2.0 in industry, little academic research has so far been conducted on the implications of this new approach for the domain of education. Much of what goes by the name of Web 2.0 can, in fact, be regarded as new kinds of learning technologies, and can be utilised as such. This paper explains the background of Web 2.0, investigates the implications for knowledge transfer in general, and then discusses its particular use in eLearning contexts with the help of short scenarios. The main challenge in the future will be to maintain essential Web 2.0 attributes, such as trust, openness, voluntariness and self-organisation, when applying Web 2.0 tools in institutional contexts.

Exploring Appropriation of Enterprise Wikis

The purpose of this paper is to provide both application-oriented researchers and practitioners with detailed insights into conception, implementation, and utilization of intra-organizational wikis to support knowledge management and group work. Firstly, we report on three case studies and describe how wikis have been appropriated in the context of a concrete practice. Our study reveals that the wikis have been used as Knowledge Base, Encyclopedia and Support Base, respectively. We present the identified practices as a result of the wiki appropriation process and argue that due to their open and flexible nature these wikis have been appropriated according to the users’ needs. Our contribution helps to understand how platforms support working practices that have not been supported by groupware before, or at least not in the same way. Secondly, three detailed implementation reports uncover many aspects of wiki projects, e.g., different viewpoints of managers and users, an investigation of other sources containing business-relevant information, and perceived obstacles to wiki projects. In this context, our study generates a series of lessons learned for people who intend to implement wikis in their own organizations, including the awareness of usage potential, the need for additional managerial support, and clear communication strategies to promote wiki usage.

Ontology Alignment—A Survey with Focus on Visually Supported Semi-Automatic Techniques

Semantic technologies are of paramount importance to the future Internet. The reuse and integration of semantically described resources, such as data or services, necessitates the bringing of ontologies into mutual agreement. Ontology alignment deals with the discovery of correspondences between concepts and relations from different ontologies. Alignment provides the key ingredient to semantic interoperability. This paper gives an overview on the state of the art in the field of visually supported semi-automatic alignment techniques and presents recent trends and developments. Particular attention is given to user interfaces and visualization techniques supporting involvement of humans in the alignment process. We derive and summarize requirements for visual semi-automatic alignment systems, provide an overview of existing approaches, and discuss the possibilities for further improvements and future research.

B-KIDE: A Framework and a Tool for Business Process Oriented Knowledge Infrastructure Development

The need for an effective management of knowledge is gaining increasing recognition in todays economy. To acknowledge this fact, new promising and powerful technologies have emerged from industrial and academic research. With these innovations maturing, organizations are increasingly willing to adapt such new knowledge management technologies to improve their knowledge-intensive businesses. However, the successful application in given business contexts is a complex, multidimensional challenge and a current research topic. Therefore, this contribution addresses this challenge and introduces a framework for the development of business process-supportive, technological knowledge infrastructures. While business processes represent the organizational setting for the application of knowledge management technologies, knowledge infrastructures represent a concept that can enable knowledge management in organizations. The B-KIDE Framework introduced in this work provides support for the development of knowledge infrastructures that comprise innovative knowledge management functionality and are visibly supportive of an organizations business processes. The developed B-KIDE Tool eases the application of the B-KIDE Framework for knowledge infrastructure developers. Three empirical studies that were conducted with industrial partners from heterogeneous industry sectors corroborate the relevance and viability of the introduced concepts. Copyright

Applications of a Lightweight, Web-Based Retrieval, Clustering, and Visualisation Framework

Todays web search engines return very large result sets for query formulations consisting of few specific keywords. Results are presented as ranked lists containing textual description of found items. Such representations do not allow identification of topical clusters, and consequentially make it difficult for users to refine queries efficiently.In this paper, we present WebRat, a framework for web-based retrieval, clustering and visualisation which enables parallel querying of multiple search engines, merging of retrieved result sets, automatic identification of topical clusters and interactive visualisation of the result sets and clusters for query refinement. This framework is lightweight in the sense that it consists of a small, platform-independent component which can be easily integrated into exisiting Internet or Intranet search forms without requiring specific system environments, server resources or precalculation efforts.The WebRat system extends existing approaches to web search result visualisation in many aspects: Found results are added incrementally as they arrive, labelling is performed in 2-dimensional space on clusters the user can see and rendering is optimised to provide sufficient performance on standard office machines.The WebRat framework has been used to implement a variety of applications: We have provided enhanced web search capabilities for users doing scientific research. Overview and refinement capabilities have been implemented for the environmental domain. Finally, abstracts generated on the fly by a knowledge management system have been used to provide topical navigation capabilities to developers searching for technical information in mailing list archives.

Synergizing standard and ad-hoc processes

In a knowledge-intensive business environment, knowledge workers perform their tasks in highly creative ways. This essential freedom required by knowledge workers often conflicts with their organizations need for standardization, control, and transparency. Within this context, the research project DYONIPOS aims to mitigate this contradiction by supporting the process engineer with insights into the process executers working behavior. These insights constitute the basis for balanced process modeling. DYONIPOS provides a process engineer support environment with advanced process modeling services, such as process visualization, standard process validation, and ad-hoc process analysis and optimization services.

Discovery and visualization of expertise in a scientific community

In numerous contexts and environments, it is necessary to identify and assign (potential) experts to subject fields. In the context of an academic journal for computer science (J.UCS), papers and reviewers are classified using the ACM classification scheme. This paper describes a system to identify and present potential reviewers for each category from the entire body of papers authors. The topical classification hierarchy is visualized as a hyperbolic tree and currently assigned reviewers are listed for a selected node (computer science category). In addition, a spiral visualization is used to overlay a ranked list of further potential reviewers (high-profile authors) around the currently selected category. This new interface eases the task of journal editors in finding and assigning reviewers. The system is also useful for users who want to find research collaborators in specific research areas.

Turning keywords into URIs: simplified user interfaces for exploring linked data

The Semantic Web strives to add structure and meaning to the Web, thereby providing better results and easier interfaces for its users. One important foundation of the Semantic Web is Linked Data, the concept of interconnected data, describing resources by use of RDF and URIs. Linked Data (LOD) provides the opportunity to explore and combine datasets on a global scale -- something which has never been possible before. However, at its current stage, the Linked Data cloud yields little benefit for end users who know nothing of ontologies, triples and SPARQL. This paper presents an intelligent technique for locating desired URIs from the huge repository of Linked Data. Search keywords provided by users are utilized intelligently for locating the intended URI. The proposed technique has been applied in a simplified end user interface for LOD. The system evaluation shows that the proposed technique has reduced users cognitive load in finding relevant information.

Dynamic Personalization in Knowledge-Based Systems from a Structural Viewpoint

Knowledge-based systems support knowledge workers in those areas of their daily work which are crucial to achieve the business goals of an organization. An open scientific challenge is the derivation of organizational knowledge from the individual knowledge of the knowledge workers, and vice versa, to provide knowledge workers with the organizational knowledge they need for performing best their daily tasks. One approach to address this challenge is to design knowledge-based systems in a way which allows them to personalize the organizational knowledge to a variety of employees according to their personal needs. In this context, often “static” personalization concepts were developed in the past. Static personalization, however, does not take into account that an individual’s knowledge changes over time. The idea of this paper is to extend the traditional approach of static personalization towards “dynamic” personalization in the context of knowledge-based systems.

Retrieving and ranking scientific publications from linked open data repositories

Content enrichment of publications stored in different cross domain Digital Libraries can facilitate the scholarly communication in big way. However, current DL still entails limitation of interoperability between cross domain repositories. This paper emphasizes on this limitation and proposes an innovative approach for finding and recommending scientific publications which are stored in disparate repositories. At first Linked Open Data is considered by exploring existing alignments between Econstor and other datasets within the current LOD cloud through the STW Thesaurus. Moreover, incorporation of other relevant metadata is proposed by implementing a data mining approach which improves the semantic relativeness of the publications from the recommended list.