Matthias Grimm’s scientific contributions

Mobile devices, such as PDAs, evolve rapidly from digital calendars and address books to hosts of more complex functionality. Screen quality, processing power and mobile networks allow for full-blown mobile information systems. However, mobility and scaled-down technology lead to specific limitations in contrast to the usage of desktop computers. It is absolutely crucial to consider these restrictions to ensure the development of usable mobile applications. In this paper, we are going to derive basic requirements for mobile knowledge management and present a first approach to possible solutions within the area of project management work. Underlying technical and human constraints are drawn from a general discussion of mobile information access and processing. We will point out focal components and problems to address. Finally, our main concept of context-aware KM will be sketched, building on the idea of Knowledge Portals and prototyped as the “BuddyAlert” system.

Although mobile knowledge management (mKM) is being perceived as an emerging R&D field, its concepts and approaches are not well-settled, as opposed to the general field of Knowledge Management (KM). In this work, we try to establish a definition for mKM. Taking into account building blocks of KM in enterprises and the abstract use cases of mKM systems we introduce an reference architecture for mKM systems as a basis for verifying and comparing concepts and system architectures. Finally we address the potential of mKM to be suitable as a prototype model for mobile, situation-aware information processing in the field of Ambient Intelligence Environments. @InProceedings{balfanz_et_al:DSP:2005:374, author = {Dirk Balfanz and Matthias Grimm and Mohammad-Reza Tazari}, title = {A Reference Architecture for Mobile Knowledge Management}, booktitle = {Mobile Computing and Ambient Intelligence: The Challenge of Multimedia}, year = {2005}, editor = {Nigel Davies and Thomas Kirste and Heidrun Schumann}, number = {05181}, series = {Dagstuhl Seminar Proceedings}, ISSN = {1862-4405}, publisher = {Internationales Begegnungs- und Forschungszentrum f{"u}r Informatik (IBFI), Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany}, address = {Dagstuhl, Germany}, URL = {http://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2005/374}, annote = {Keywords: Knowledge Management, Mobile Computing, Context-Awareness, Ambient Intelligence} }

Up to now, information visualizations have been mainly used to support information retrieval. In the study presented here, we investigate whether information visualizations can also be used to aid in acquiring knowledge, that is, in memorizing and understanding large abstract data structures. Furthermore, we address the issue of how information visualizations have to be designed in order to support knowledge acquisition of abstract data. To this end, we conducted an experimental study investigating the influence of the factors “dimensionality” and “color coding”. The domain was the building industry. The study provided evidence that information visualizations may foster knowledge acquisition and that two-dimensional information visualizations are better suited for supporting knowledge acquisition than three-dimensional ones. In addition, we found a marginal main effect of color coding, that is, the use of color coding slightly increased performance in a knowledge test. To conclude our analysis, we will outline how information visualizations for fostering knowledge acquisition can benefit from the field of knowledge visualization.

Mobile devices as PDAs evolve rapidly from digital calendars and address books to hosts of more complex functionality. Mobile access to business information such as customer, product or project databases is seen as one of the cutting edge IT solutions for improving productivity and customer satisfaction. However, mobility and scaled-down mobile technology lead to specific limitations in contrast to the usage of desktop computers. These restrictions are absolutely crucial to consider for the development of usable mobile applications.With reference to the project map—Multimedia Arbeitsplatz der Zukunft (Multimedia Workplace of the Future), this article outlines our main approach to situation-aware support for mobile workers in response to mobile restrictions. We are pointing out focal components and sketch parts of the map architecture, in particular the prototypical application “BuddyAlert”.

In mobile environments, the usage of mobile agents is very common. After being configured by the user, mobile agents can perform tasks autonomously and present their results when they have finished their task. In most cases, communication between user and agent is only necessary at the time of configuration and at the time of presentation, when the agent has accomplished its task. Our research activities deal with agent-based applications for mobile users with mobile devices of low processing power and without Java capabilities, which yields the question of how user interfaces can be implemented. In this paper, different approaches for the communication between users and agents are summarized and classified with respect to our applications. An agent platform gateway is introduced as our approach to user interface implementation and some services of the gateway are described in detail.

Hypervideo content can be understood as a video-based hypermedia information structure providing a user the option to exert influence on the way the video-related content is presented. It offers a user the opportunity to take an active part in the presentation. It has been proven that the combination of interactivity, video content and multimedia documents forming a hypermedia structure is a powerful way to present information. Collaborative knowledge construction within communities on the Internet is a hot topic today, providing support for exchanging and retrieving multimedia content based on group conversation. With this paper, we announce a first approach to a hypervideo collaborative learning interface concept for mobile environments. This approach enables users to extend the interactive video content with multimedia documents during a presentation in order to exchange and share experiences and views with other members within a mobile community.

A major problem in the domain of context-aware and adaptive HCI is the lack of a shared understanding of context. Many of the existing context-aware applications act independently from a shared context management service relying on a curtailed context model not appropriate for interoperability between independently running components. This paper aims at identifying the core of context parameters for a mobile user, followed by a discussion about the classification of these parameters. For each identified class, the most important properties are then determined. The context model presented here is a result of our two major projects from the domain of mobile workplaces and mobile knowledge management (m ma ap p 1 1 and mummy 2). Most parts of the model, however, can be applied in arbitrary scenarios and systems.

Although mobile knowledge management is being perceived as an emerging R&D field, its concepts and approaches are not well-settled, as opposed to the general field of knowledge management. In this paper, we try to fill this gap by establishing a definition for mKM, specifying the abstract use cases of mKM systems, and intro-ducing a reference model as a basis for verifying and comparing concepts and system architectures.