Andrea Kohlhase

• Professor
• Human-Computer Interaction and Web-Development at Neu Ulm University of Applied Sciences

Much of the wealth of industrialized societies is based on knowledge that is laid down and communicated in scientific/technical/engineering/mathematical documents: highly structured documents that contain diagrams, images, and – most daunting to many readers – mathematical formulae. It seems clear that digital, interactive documents have the potent...

Mathematics uses formulae to express knowledge about objects concisely and economically. Mathematical formulae are at the same time an indispensable tool for the initiated and a formidable barrier to novices. Surprisingly little is known about the cognitive basis of this practice. In this paper we start to rectify this situation with an investigati...

Mathematical vernacular – the everyday language we use to communicate about mathematics is characterized by a special vocabulary. If we want to support humans with mathematical documents, we need to extract their semantics and for that we need a resource that captures the terminological, linguistic, and ontological aspects of the mathematical vocab...

Even though spreadsheet programs traditionally concentrate on exploration and computation of data (the author's view), a non-trivial proportion of spreadsheets are used for communicating data, models, and decisions to humans who assume the role of a spreadsheet reader. The communicative use of spreadsheets gives the spreadsheet context, that is, th...

Spreadsheets are tools to model personal, business and scientific data and to support decision-making based on such models. Moreover, spreadsheets are used for communicating data, models, and decisions, which makes the interpretability of spreadsheet intents an important consideration in the design of spreadsheet interaction. In this paper we will...

New technologies and interfaces are changing the way users engage with technology, mathematicians are no exception. In a previous study we found some interesting attitudes/practices of professional mathematicians with respect to search interfaces, that sets them apart from other web searchers. In a nutshell, this study explores whether and if so, h...

Access to mathematical knowledge has changed dramatically in recent years, therefore changing mathematical search practices. Our aim with this study is to scrutinize professional mathematicians' search behavior. With this understanding we want to be able to reason why mathematicians use which tool for what search problem in what phase of the search...

Spreadsheets are well-known to be frequently-used but error-prone communication devices. They are useful since they are active (e.g., automatic computation), provide a cognitive notation system drawing on visualizing values, meanings and relations at the same time (enabled by labeled, color-coded grids), and provide easy-to-use domain-specific oper...

Complex workflows require intelligent interactions. In this paper we attack the problem of combining user interfaces of specialized applications that support different aspects of objects in scientific/technical workflows with semantic technologies. We analyze the problem in terms of the (new) notion of full semantic transparency, i.e., the property...

Spreadsheets have become very popular tools for analyzing and visualizing data from business and science. To better understand human-spreadsheet interaction, we explore readers’ information models, but in contrast to most studies we focus on spreadsheet readers rather than spreadsheet authors. We conducted a study using the repertory grid technique...

Documents of type "spreadsheet" are considered user interfaces to numeric data as they allow authors to create, modify and display these data in distinct layouts like tables or diagrams and readers to interpret them. We tend to believe that enhancing software semantically means that we are lifting its value. In particular, if we enhance spreadsheet...

Spreadsheets are active documents that are heavily employed in administration, financial forecasting, education, and science because of their intuitive, flexible, and direct approach to computation. But they are also error-prone, poorly documented, often contain actual data in legacy form. Therefore, assistance for high-impact spreadsheet users is...

We present an architecture and software framework for semantic allies: Semantic systems that complement existing software applications with semantic services and interactions based on a background ontology. On the one hand, our Semantic Alliance framework follows an invasive approach: Users can profit from semantic technology without having to leav...

Mathematical documents are not only hard but fun to write, they are equally hard but fun to read. Unfortunately, the "fun" part comes only in, when one has mastered the art of using mathematical vernacular and grasped all relevant context dimensions. Even though this seems an immanent issue for mathematical authors only, it is also for mathematical...

Social tagging systems celebrate enormous growth rates on the World Wide Web. This chapter looks at social tagging from an educational perspective, particularly its use for educational environments. The authors identify the processes underlying social tagging from an embodied interaction perspective. The authors will support the thesis that emergin...

In this paper we present the Active Documents Paradigm (semantically annotated documents associated with a content commons that holds the corresponding background ontologies) and the Planetary system (as an active document player). We show that the current Planetary system gives a solid foundation and can be extended modularly to address most of th...

Much of the scientific, technical, engineering, and mathematical knowledge that enables modern society is laid down and communicated in technical documents. Due to their static presentation of the complex issues involved, they remain inaccessible to most readers and pose formidable barriers even for experts. To enable advanced interactions which wo...

One of the core tasks of technical communication and knowledge management is maintaining the internal and external consistency of document collections. The design of (technical) communication infrastructures has to take this into account from the start. Consistency of static collections is enforced by format constraints (e.g. specified in a schema...

Executable scientific papers contain not just layouted text for reading. They contain, or link to, machine-comprehensible representations of the scientific findings or experiments they describe. Client-side players can thus enable readers to "check, manipulate and explore the result space". We have realized executable papers in the STEM domain with...

Spreadsheets are active documents that are heavily employed in administration, financial forecasting, education, and science because of their intuitive, flexible, and direct approach to computation. But they are also error-prone, poorly documented, often contain actual data in legacy form. Therefore, assistance for high-impact spreadsheet users is...

Social tagging systems celebrate enormous growth rates on the World Wide Web. This chapter looks at social tagging from an educational perspective, particularly its use for educational environments. The authors identify the processes underlying social tagging from an embodied interaction perspective. The authors will support the thesis that emergin...

As documents become disseminated widely, establishing the context for interpretation becomes difficult. We argue that high-impact documents require embedded user assistance facilities for their readers (not authors) to cope with their semantic complexity. We suggest to illustrate such documents and their players with a semiformal background ontolog...

In previous work we have studied how an explicit representation of background knowledge associated with a specific spreadsheet can be exploited to alleviate usability problems with spreadsheet-based applications. We have implemented this approach in the SACHS system to provide a semantic help system for spreadsheets applications. In this paper, we...

Social tagging systems celebrate enormous growth rates on the World Wide Web. In this article, we want to look at social tagging from an educational perspective, particularly its use for educational environments. We identify the processes underlying social tagging from an embodied-interaction perspective. We will support the thesis that emerging fo...

We present the sTeX+ system, a user-driven advancement of sTeX - a semantic extension of LaTeX that allows for producing high-quality PDF documents for (proof)reading and printing, as well as semantic XML/OMDoc documents for the Web or further processing. Originally sTeX had been created as an invasive, semantic frontend for authoring XML documents...

We study the formalization of a collection of documents created for a Software Engineering project from an MKM perspective. We analyze how document and collection markup formats can cope with an open-ended, multi-dimensional space of primary and secondary classifications and relationships. We show that RDFa-based extensions of MKM formats, employin...

Social tagging systems celebrate enormous growth rates on the World Wide Web. This chapter looks at social tagging from an educational perspective, particularly its use for educational environments. The authors identify the processes underlying social tagging from an embodied interaction perspective. The authors will support the thesis that emergin...

Since Mathematics really is about what mathematicians do, in this paper, we will look at the mathematical practice of framing, in which an object of interest is viewed in terms of well-understood math- ematical structures. The new perspective not only allows to deepen the understanding of a resp. object, it also facilitates new insights. We pro- po...

Spreadsheets are mathematical documents that are heavily employed in administration, nancial forecasting, education, and science because of their intuitive, exible, and direct approach to computation. In this paper we show that spreadsheets are interesting applications for MKM techniques which can alleviate usability and maintenance prob- lems as s...

In this paper we analyze the problem of \situating expla- nations" in user assistance systems. We introduce semantic transparency as a user interface property that enables giv- ing appropriate help. We explicate this notion in document player applications found in oce suites, for example. More- over, we show how semantic transparency can be strengt...

One of the major issues for user assistance systems consists of \providing help at an appropriate level". In this paper we analyze the problem of modeling task experience | a prerequisite for provisioning adequate help. In contrast to level-based approaches we propose an ontology-based model, which allows ne-grained modeling of task experience usin...

ldquoSemantic technologiesrdquo are touted as the next big wave in educational technology and as the solution to many problems in this arena. Interdisciplinary work between the fields of knowledge management (KM) and educational technology (ET) is booming. But the crop of actual systems and semantically enhanced learning objects is still meager, ma...

Spreadsheets are heavily employed in ad- ministration, nancial forecasting, education, and science because of their intuitive, exible, and direct approach to computation. They represent examples for \active documents" which are considered very worthwhile in the eld of Knowledge Management. But these activity traits also lead to usability and main-...

In this chapter we will look at users’ taking action processes in Semantic Work Environments. We argue that the underlying motivational problem between vast semantic potential and extra personal investment can be considered as a “Semantic Prisoner’s Dilemma” that builds on two competing value perspectives: The micro and macroperspective. The former...

The interest of the field of Mathematical Knowledge Management is predicated on the assumption that by investing into markup or formalization of mathematical knowledge, we can reap benefits in managing (creating, classifying, reusing, verifying, and finding) mathematical theories, statements, and objects. This global value proposition has been used...

Knowledge Management (KM) and E-Learning (EL) applications interface more and more as their objects of concern consist in 'captured knowledge' resp. 'learning objects', i.e. con- tent. In this paper, we want to discuss the poten- tial synergy from their fusion with respect to two area-specific difficulties: KM's Authoring Prob- lem ("Where are the...

In this chapter we will look at users' taking action processes in Semantic Work Environments. We argue that the underlying motivational problem between vast semantic potential and extra personal investment can be considered as a "Semantic Prisoner's Dilemma" that builds on two competing value perspectives: The micro and macroperspective. The former...

In this paper we want to make use of the "Hundred Languages of Children" observed by Reggio peda- gogue L. Malaguzzi, in order to understand the process of being engaged by and engaging with soft- ware. These languages allow children to appropriate objects on many levels. Here, we are interested what this means for usage of software and whether we...

We explore the social context of mathematical knowledge: Even though, the community of mathematicians may look homogeneous from the outside, it is actually structured into various sub-communities that dier in preferred notations, the choice of basic assumptions, or e.g. in the choice of motivating examples. We contend that we cannot manage mathemat...

In this paper we will take a closer look at the rela- tionship between users and New Media — in particu- lar at learning technology. Our starting point is that New Media have a lot of potential, but for eLearning the expected lift-off hasn't taken place yet, a problem that is being tackled by the evolving learner-centered technology. We may ask und...

Content objects are essential links between Knowledge Man- agement and E-Learning systems. Therefore content authoring and shar- ing is an important, interdisciplinary topic in the resp. fields. In this paper, we want to critically elaborate on the "user as producer and consumer"-concept for content production and consumption. We address the subjec...

Social Tagging and thereby folksonomies celebrate enormous growth rates on the Internet. In this paper we will identify the underlying processes from an Embodied Interaction perspective [1]. We will support our thesis that folksonomies are embodied conceptualizations and are therefore helpful in E-Learning set-tings by results from various concerne...

Although knowledge is a central topic for MKM there is little explicit discussion on what ‘knowledge’ might actually be. There are specific intuitions about form and content of knowledge, about its structure, and epistemological nature that shape the MKM systems, but a conceptual model is missing. In this paper we try to rationalize this discussion...

Automated knowledge management techniques critically depend on the availability of semantically enhanced documents which are hard to come by in practice. Starting from a detailed look at the motivations of users to produce semantic data, we argue that the authoring problem experienced by MKM is actually an author’s dilemma. An analysis of the conte...

Contrary to popular perception, MS PowerPoint (PPT) is not so much a tool for presentation optimization but rather a tool for opt imization of presentation production. This difference has been neglected so far, but from a pe dagogical standpoint it is crucial: in the former, the emphasis lies on the effect of the document (ed ucational value for st...