Mihály Jakob

Modeling and generating application logic for data-intensive web applications

This paper presents a new approach for the development of data-intensive web applications that depend on sophisticated application logic. E-Commerce web sites, on-line auction systems and large enterprise web portals fall into this category as they require comprehensive data access, data processing and data manipulation capabilities. However, existing methodologies mainly concentrate on modeling content, navigation and presentation aspects of read-only web sites. In our opinion these models are not sufficient to express complex operations that access or modify web application content. Therefore, we propose an additional Operation Model defining the operation logic of a web application. We show that based on this model a significant part of a web applications Operation Layer can be generated, still allowing the manual implementation of arbitrary additional functionality. We evaluate our approach and present experimental results based on a large example application for the area of innovation management.

A SOA-based approach for the integration of a data propagation system

Major challenges that companies face nowadays are extremely volatile markets, a globally distributed supplier network and constantly changing business environments. These circumstances demand a high level of agility and extraordinary flexibility in the business modeling and the organizational structures of a company as well as adaptive and interoperable IT systems. In order to meet these requirements an integration of systems needs to be achieved.

DCbot: finding spatial information on the web

The WWW provides an overwhelming amount of information, which – spatially indexed – can be a valuable additional data source for location-based applications. By manually building a spatial index, only a fraction of the available resources can be covered. This paper introduces a system for the automatic mapping of web pages to geographical locations. Our web robot uses several sets of domain specific keywords, lexical context rules, that are automatically learned, and a hierarchical catalogue of geographical locations that provides exact geographical coordinates for locations. Spatially indexed web pages are used to construct Geographical Web Portals, which can be accessed by different location-based applications. In addition, we present experimental results demonstrating the quantity and the quality of automatically indexed web pages.

DCbot: exploring the Web as value-added service for location-based applications

Location-based services (LBS) are typically mobile applications that adapt their behavior to the spatial context of the user, e.g. by providing maps and navigational information of the users current position. Existing location-based applications rely on spatial data that is gathered and preprocessed especially for them and that is stored by particular data providers. Location-based applications can benefit from World Wide Web and additional information source, if, in a preprocessing step, Web pages are mapped to locations. A model for this is virtual information towers (VIT), spatial Web portals with a location and a visibility area that represents the region where the information is relevant. DCbot processes HTML pages in the WWW like a crawler of a search engine. It analyses the pages using pre-defined rules and spatial knowledge and maps them to locations.

EXPOSE: searching the web for expertise

Knowledge is the key factor to economic success. While more and more knowledge is explicitly written down and freely available to anybody, there is still a lot of knowledge and expertise available only implicitly in the form of experts that can be consulted. In practice, however, a common problem is that for a given topic, these experts are unknown. Companies have been trying to solve this problem for years by running in-house expert finder tools, yellow pages systems and several other knowledge management tools. However, especially in smaller companies, the required knowledge often is simply not available in-house due to missing human resources and thus the required experts cannot be found using the mentioned approaches. To widen the search space and thus the number of potential experts that can be found, we developed the Expert Search Engine EXPOSE [1] that supports users in finding experts for arbitrary topics on the web. Our approach utilizes the fact that with the WWW, a huge data resource is available that can be searched for information about people or companies that are likely to have expertise on the topic in question. However, in contrast to enterprise knowledge management systems, a web based expert finder tool cannot rely on information about content structures as typically available in intranet scenarios. Instead, it has to cope with unstructured information resources. The definition of heuristics how to access this unstructured data and extract structured information as well as to decide to what extent a person matches the given search criteria are major issues in this context.

Towards an operation model for generated web applications

This paper describes a new approach for the development of data-intensive web applications that depend on non-trivial data manipulation. E-Commerce web sites, on-line auction systems and large enterprise web portals fall into this category, as they require comprehensive data access, data processing and data manipulation capabilities. However, existing methodologies mainly concentrate on modeling content, navigation and presentation aspects of read-only web sites. Approaches that consider modeling data operations incorporate them into existing models resulting in a less clear design. We argue that existing models are not sufficient to express complex operations that access or modify web application content. Therefore, we propose an additional Operation Model defining operations for data-intensive web applications. We also propose the utilization of a web application generator to create an Operation Layer based on this Operation Model.

Frühe Innovationsphasen: Informationsgewinnung durch Delphi-unterstütztes Szenario-Management und Expertensuche

Kurzfassung Frühe Innovationsphasen stellen für Unternehmen eine besondere Herausforderung dar, da in ihnen Orientierungswissen geschaffen und strukturiert werden muss, das bei einer Entscheidungsfindung über den Einstieg in ein Technologie- oder Marktfeld oder auch ein bestimmtes Produktsegment unterstützt. Dafür können verschiedene Informationsquellen, wie z.B. das Internet und externe Experten, genutzt werden. Hier setzt das Forschungsprojekt nova-net an. Es stellt die zwei Methoden des Delphi-unterstützten Szenario-Managements und der Expertensuche mit den dazugehörigen Software-Tools SEMAFOR und EXPOSE zur Verfügung, die den Arbeitsaufwand der Informationsbeschaffung und Strukturierung deutlich reduzieren und die in ihrer Kombination eine gute Unterstützung bei der Entscheidungsfindung in frühen Innovationsphasen liefern.

Generierung von Webanwendungen für das Innovationsmanagement (Generating Web Applications for the Management of Innovations)

Zusammenfassung Der folgende Beitrag gibt einen Überblick über das vom Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF) im Schwerpunktprogramm Internetökonomie geförderte Forschungsprojekt nova-net: Innovation in der Internetökonomie. Neben dem Forschungsrahmen und den Forschungsfeldern zur Unterstützung nachhaltiger Innovationsprozesse wird insbesondere auf die Methodenentwicklung und deren informationstechnische Umsetzung im Themenfeld Trendmonitoring im Szenariomanagement eingegangen. Im Mittelpunkt steht hierbei die Erläuterung des Szenario-Management-Frameworks SEMAFOR im Zusammenhang mit einer neu entwickelten Methode zur Entwicklung von Szenarien, sowie deren Umsetzung mittels des Webanwendungsgenerators WAgen. Summary This article gives an overview of the research project nova-net: Innovation in the Internet Economy, which is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). Besides the presentation of the research framework and research areas, details on method development and implementation in the research area Trend Monitoring and Scenario Management are provided. The focus lies thereby on the description of the Scenario Management Framework SEMAFOR in conjunction with a newly developed scenario development method, as well as their implementation with the web application generator WAgen.