Florian Probst

SAP Research | SAP · SAP Research

In one embodiment the present invention includes a computer-implemented method of annotating software objects. The method includes storing rules that define how to annotate a software object. The method further includes processing the software object according to the rules. The method further includes generating an annotation document based on the...

Formal models of user interfaces are widely popular in the literature, and various user interface description languages exist. For several use cases, the use of ontologies as models for user interfaces has been discussed, leveraging the advantages of a machine-interpretable semantics of user interface components. However, a comprehensive ontology o...

The amount of real-time user-generated content about disasters and large scale incidents has increased drastically. However, this valuable information source is hardly used by relief organizations for improving emergency response. Currently, relief organizations have little support in filtering and aggregating the overwhelming flood of information....

The effectiveness of emergency response largely depends on having a precise, up-to-date situational picture. With the World Wide Web having evolved from a small read-only text collection to a large-scale collection of socially created data accessible both to machines and humans alike, with the advent of social media and ubiquitous mobile applicatio...

Emergency management is a domain where information has to be gathered, aggregated, and visualized dynamically and quickly. By providing the right information at the right time, the chaos phase between the occurrence of a disaster and the start of well-organized relief measures can be significantly shortened (Paulheim et

Ontologies have been increasingly used in software systems in the past years. However, in many of those systems, the ontologies are hidden “under the hood”. While a lot of useful applications of ontologies on the database and business logic layer have been proposed, the employment of ontologies in user interfaces has been gaining comparatively litt...

The goal of reference models is to establish a common vocabulary and recently also to facilitate semantically unambiguous information exchange between IT systems. However, IT systems are based on implementation models that typically deviate significantly from the reference models. This raises the need for a mapping mechanism, which is flexible enou...

Disaster management software deals with supporting staff in large catastrophic incidents such as earthquakes or floods, e.g., by providing relevant information, facilitating task and resource planning, and managing communication with all involved parties. In this paper, we introduce the SoKNOS support system, which is a functional prototype for suc...

Capturing a domain of discourse in an object-oriented class model and in a reference ontology leads to different results. On the one hand, modeling decisions for class models are motivated by pragmatic and efficiency-related choices because modeling decisions are motivated by different choices. However, information integration scenarios require a c...

The complexity and openness of today's modern societies result in the threat of serious cascading effects when natural disasters or terrorist attacks strike. Thus, there is a high demand for state of the art IT support in the field of emergency management systems. In this paper, we identify the core requirements of future emergency management syste...

During the past years, a lot of user interface descrip-tion languages, most of them based on XML, have been introduced. At the same time, the use of formal ontolo-gies for describing user interfaces has been discussed for a number of use cases. This paper discusses the differences between a formal ontologies and user inter-face description language...

Integration of software applications can be achieved on different levels: the data level, the business logic level, and the user interface level. Integration on the user interface level means assembling the user interfaces of existing applications in a framework allowing seamless, unified interaction with those applications. While integration on th...

The principle challenge for information semantics lies in the degrees of freedom to interpret symbols in terms of thoughts and experiences which leads to incompatible views on the world. Consequently, incompatible information ontolo- gies and interpretations of the described data will remain. Even though there is usu- ally a common experiential gro...

Ontologies have been increasingly used in software systems in the past years. However, in many of those systems, the ontologies are hidden "under the hood". While a lot of useful applications of ontologies on the database and business logic layer have been proposed, the employment of ontologies in user interfaces has been gaining comparatively litt...

There are different strategies to integrate software sys-tems: integration on the data layer, on the business logic layer, and on the user interface layer. The latter area, recently gaining attention by the rising popularity of Web 2.0 mashups, can benefit heavily from formal models and ontologies. In this paper, we argue why integration on the use...

A crucial aspect for large-scale disaster management is an efficient technology support for communication and decision-making processes in command and control centers. Yet, experiences with the introduction of novel technologies in this setting show that field professionals tend to remain attached to traditional workflows and artifacts, such as pen...

In this paper, we provide an overview of the research project SoKNOS (Service-Oriented ArchiteCtures Supporting Networks of Public Security) which was funded by the German Federal Ministery of Education and Research (BMBF). The SoKNOS project developed concepts for IT systems supporting both public and private organizations in effectively and safel...

Cross-disciplinary e-science can be enabled by using foundational ontologies such as Dolce to integrate knowledge representations from different geoscience domains. Geoscientists are increasingly concerned with big problems related to climate change, natural hazards, and environmental health. In solving these problems, they're regularly encounterin...

Implementing systems for emergency response poses various challenges. Information from various sources and systems needs to be integrated, processed, aggregated, and visualized in a dynamic and consistent fashion. Amongst all those challenges, one key issue is the development of an optimal user interface, which allows for intuitive operation with d...

One of the most pressing issues in improving disaster management is that of information integration. With many organizations involved in the disaster, crossing regional or even national borders, information exchange is crucial but cumbersome due to differing vocabularies and representations both at human language and IT level. Carefully designed on...

Emerging Spatial Data Infrastructures and non-spatial Web Service environments allow new approaches to dynamically integrate information sources. The ability for dynamic information integration provides the basis on which an emergency management system should allow its users to create spatial, temporal and structural views on the emergency situatio...

Application integration can be carried out on three dier- ent levels: the data source level, the business logic level, and the user interface level. With ontologies-based integra- tion on the data source level dating back to the 1990s and semantic web services for integrating on the business logic level coming of age, it is time for the next logica...

Ontology-based descriptions of Web Services serve the purpose of negotiating meaning. A consensus between service provider and service consumer needs to be installed. We argue that the process of installing a shared conceptualization between service provider and consumer requires an foundational ontology. With an experiment which exhibits four prev...

What is needed to enable communication about observation and measurement results in information systems? Information system ontologies make a certain conceptualization explicit and partially account for the meanings of symbols associated with this conceptualization. Yet, the meaning of signs denoting measurement results such as “10 m”, “red” or “hi...

Conceptual representations are being developed within many geoscience domains to aid semantic-enabled scientific computing, e.g. geology, geophysics, hydrology, marine science, planetary science. These representations often make different ontological assumptions, causing their integration to be impeded. This is particularly problematic for science...

Introduction to the Special Issue on GI-Days, Muenster 2007: Young Researchers Forum by the Guest Editors

Ontologies are being developed bottom-up in many geoscience domains to aid semantic-enabled computing. The contents of these ontologies are typically partitioned along domain boundaries, such as geology, geophsyics, hydrology, or are developed for specific data sets or processing needs. At the same time, very general foundational ontologies are bei...

Geographic information is based on observations or measurements. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has developed an implementation specification for observations and measurements (O&M). It specifies precisely how to encode information. Yet, the O&M conceptual model does not specify precisely which real-world entities are denoted by the specified...

Matching descriptions of user requirements against descriptions of service capabilities is crucial for the discovery of appropriate services for a given task. To improve the precision of approaches that consider only syntacti- cal aspects of matchmaking (e.g. UDDI) several approaches for semantic matchmaking have been proposed. We compare two appro...

Composition of web services based on currently available descrip- tions such as WSDL are error-prone because the meaning (or semantics) of the labels used in these syntactic descriptions is unclear. We identify three types of problems that can result from semantically heterogeneous descriptions during service composition. These problems call for a...

OGC and ISO have developed extensive standards for geospatial applications, providing well-founded definitions of concepts related to the geospatial domain. Currently these standards are available in textual descriptions supported by UML static structure diagrams, giving guidance to developers to implement applications. However, in an open and dist...

The discovery of services that are appropriate for answering a given question is a crucial task in the open and distributed environment of web ser- vices for geographic information. In order to find these services the concepts underlying their implementation have to be matched against the requirements resulting from the question. It is in this matc...

services to achieve a certain task has become central. Solving this problem requires semantic interoperability (Harvey, Kuhn et al. 1999; Sheth 1999; Visser and Stuckenschmidt 2002; Buehler 2003). Formal ontologies have proven useful to capture the semantics of information sources. However, semantic interoperability between ontologically annotated...

Ontologies have been acknowledged to be the core methodology for capturing and sharing seman-tics of geospatial information (GI). Ontologies, specifically domain-specific ontologies, are at the heart of most semantic approaches to interoperability. In this paper we want to make a strong case for the importance of domain ontologies in the context of...

Current GI service composition based on syntactic descriptions such as WSDL are error-prone because the meaning of the labels used in these descriptions is unclear. We identify three types of problems that can result from such semantically heterogeneous descriptions during service composition. These problems call for a Semantic Reference System for...

Noise pollution is a problem increasingly acknowledged by authorities and governments around the globe. However, creating noise maps with conventional methods is either in-accurate or very expensive. To increase the spatial and tem-poral data resolution a high number of sensors must be de-ployed. In this paper we present results and prototypes base...