Norbert Kuhn

A Model and Selected Instances of Green and Sustainable Software

The power consumption of ICT is still increasing. To date it is not clear if the energy savings through ICT overbalance the energy consumption by ICT or not. Where manifold efforts of Green IT address the environmental aspects of sustainability considering computer hardware, there is a lack of models, descriptions, or realizations in the area of computer software. In this paper we present some results that form the basis towards a definition of the term ”Sustainable Software”, an outline of a process and lifecycle model for ”Green and Sustainable Software Engineering”, and six concrete instances of this model for practitioners.

Enhancing Accessibility to E-Government Processes

Many governmental institutions provide their customers with access to documents by electronic means. It is worthwhile to look at both the chances and the risks which this process implies for disabled citizens. Due to legal constraints governmental authorities are particularly responsible to consider the needs of handicapped persons. Our contribution follows the observation that governmental processes mostly are based on forms. We distinguish several processing scenarios, with the use of paper as means of transport on the one end and complete electronic treatment at the other end. This article focuses on approaches that provide access to governmental processes for people with visual impairments. Additionally, we aim to enable electronic government processes in developing countries where citizens have limited experience in handling IT-based processes. We describe an approach to associate synthesized speech to scanned images of printed documents, thus yielding an audio-visual document representation.

Verwendbarkeit von Klassifikationssystemen und Katalogstandards zum Aufbau von elektronischen Handelsbörsen für gebrauchte Maschinen

In den letzten Jahren gewann der weltweite Handel auf Internet-Marktplatzen immer weiter an Bedeutung. Um sich mit seinem Marktplatz im Internet zu behaupten, ist es fair den Betreiber wichtig, von der Struktur und vom Aufbau her ein moglichst breites Publikum anzusprechen und an sich zu binden. Der Erfolg einer Handelsborse zeichnet sich nicht allein durch die angebotenen Guter aus, sondern auch durch deren Verfugbarkeit und Erscheinungsbild im Internet. Vergleichbare Angebote gehoren dazu ebenso wie eine einfache Handhabung der Borse sowohl fair potentielle Interessenten als auch fur Handler,die in der Borse ihre Angebote einstellen wollen. Dadurch wird Kommunikation zwischen den Beteiligten erleichtert. Auch fur das Angebot von gebrauchten Industriemaschinen ist der Bedarf an elektronischen Marktplatzen in den letzten Jahren gewachsen. In diesem Beitrag beschranken wir uns auf die Darstellung eines geeigneten Klassifikationssystems, mit dem die Produkte ausreichend genau beschrieben und strukturiert werden konnen. Zum Ubertragen der Produktkataloge soll eine entsprechende Katalogdokumentvorlage im XML-Formcit existieren. Die Daten werden uber eine spezielle Schnittstelle mit Hilfe eines Mapping-Dokumentes in den Marktplatz eingelesen.

Social Media in the context of Academic Marketing — Case study: The Umwelt-Campus Blog

Academic Marketing is on the rise in Germany. So is Social Media Marketing. In this paper we present a concept for academic marketing based on a social media marketing strategy developed and implemented at the Environmental Campus Birkenfeld, a site of Trier University of Applied Sciences. We discuss the development and implementation of this strategy starting from an evaluation of the use and needs of social media of students, professors and other university staff. This survey provides the basis for the requirements analysis for a platform for internal and external communication, whose structure is presented here. We outline some considerations about launching such a platform and we report some very first results in terms of user acceptance and feedback.

Such-und Klassifizierungsstrategien in elektronischen Produktkatalogen

Die Suche nach geeigneten Produkten in Datenbanken und Internet stellt eine wesentliche Aufgabe in elektronischen Geschaftsprozessen dar. Dabei hangt die Qualitat der Suchergebnisse im Wesentlichen von drei Faktoren ab: Genauigkeit der Anfrage, Struktur und Qualitat des Produktdatenbestandes und Art des Suchverfahrens. In dieser Arbeit werden Methoden vorgestellt, mit denen merkmalsbasierte Produktkataloge durch die Kombination von Methoden des Information Retrieval mit fuzzyfizierten Ansatzen durchmustert werden. In einem mehrstufigen Verfahren wird zunachst die Anzahl der zu bewertenden Produkte eingeschrankt. Anschliesend wird pro Merkmal jedes Ergebniskandidaten ein Gewicht anhand von Zugehorigkeitsfunktionen der Fuzzy-Technologie bestimmt, das schlieslich zu einer Produktrelevanz zusammengefasst wird. Das Verfahren lasst sich auch zur automatischen Klassifikation vorhandener Produkte einsetzen.

Semantically-Oriented Business Process Visualization for a Data and Constraint-Based Workflow Approach

This paper introduces a novel approach which unifies a data-centric and a constraint-based workflow principle to support the requirements of knowledge intensive business processes. By the integration of a knowledge-based system, process definition and execution relevant data coincide on an ontology-based semantic net. The data, mainly driving the process, can be delivered by different sources or can be the result of an inference step by the underlying ontology. In such a case, AI technology plays an active role during the process execution and result in a division of labor with human actors. This paper presents a concept for a semantically-oriented process visualization for the introduced unified approach.

Extended user interface definition for the framework RUNNING

This paper presents our framework for runtime generated user adapted interfaces and describes an extension to the work we presented in [1]. We call our system RUNNING to emphasize that user interfaces are generated at the runtime of an application. In addition, RUNNING allows to generate adaptable user interfaces in the sense that the resulting interface considers both the capabilities of the users device as well as the preferences of the user. The generation process itself runs on a server to ensure fast calculation and to make it available for arbitrary client systems. We also present an extension to our Abstract Definition of the Interface, which is called (ADI_VAR). With the extension it is possible to change the content of a user interface dynamically. RUNNING is also very comfortable for software developers. It allows them to concentrate on the logic of an interface rather than focusing on the UI components.

Experiments with Adaptable Multimodal User Interfaces for Mobile Devices

Our daily living environment contains more and more technical systems, which need human control. Modern mobile devices offer functionalities to act as generic control devices for these technical systems. Besides classical user interactions they provide components to process new ways of human-machine interactions like speech and touch inputs. In this article, we describe a software framework to support multimodal inputs for Android based mobile devices. We exploit this framework in a case study to develop adaptable, multimodal user interfaces for two different instances of robot controls. Furthermore, we present some results from evaluating these interfaces with a couple of test persons.

Experiments with Adaptable Interfaces for Elderly People

The demographic change in European societies has led to raise attention for the needs of elderly people. Many of elderly people suffer from cognitive as well as from physical restrictions. This impacts their ability to participate and to communicate in their social environment. This could be substituted by constructing a virtual social environment based on services like videoconferences, chat rooms, e-mail and so on. However, elderly people often have difficulties to use IT technology because they encounter restrictions caused by their age. Thus, they need specific and adaptable human computer interfaces to be able to interact with IT systems. We present here some ideas how such interfaces can be constructed with reasonable effort and discuss some results from an evaluation of these ideas for an implementation of an interface to a personal information system for elderly and handicapped users.

Document management for elderly people

The demographic change in European societies has lead to increased attention for the needs of elderly people. Techniques and tools to support their independent living at home are of particular interest. In this article we focus on the aspect of daily information management for this user group. We describe a system which simplifies access to and the management of printed documents. It enables the use of information technology even for users with decreased visual abilities as well as for users with limited experience in human computer interfaces. To implement the system we exploit consumer electronics being commercially available (e.g. television set, webcam). This embeds the system into the context of media experience of most elderly people. Furthermore, our approach results into a cost-effective realisation of a document management system which should be affordable for a large number of persons.