Matthias Quasthoff’s research while affiliated with Hasso Plattner Institute and other places

This paper presents the state of the art in the development of Semantic-Web-enabled software using object-oriented programming languages. Object triple mapping (OTM) is a frequently used method to simplify the development of such software. A case study that is based on interviews with developers of OTM frameworks is presented at the core of this paper. Following the results of the case study, the formalization of OTM is kept separate from optional but desirable extensions of OTM with regard to metadata, schema matching, and integration into the Semantic-Web infrastructure. The material that is presented is expected to not only explain the development of Semantic-Web software by the usage of OTM, but also explain what properties of Semantic-Web software made developers come up with OTM. Understanding the latter will be essential to get nonexpert software developers to use Semantic-Web technologies in their software.

Remote collaboration among geographically dis- persed team members has become standard practice for many companies and research teams. A number of computer supported collaborative work systems exist, but there still lacks acceptable support for teams working in creative settings, where tradi- tionally numerous physical and analog tools are used. We have created an environment for teams applying creative methods that allows them to work together efficiently across distances, without having to change their working modes. We present the Tele-Board system, which combines video conferencing with a synchronous transparent whiteboard overlay. This setup enables regionally separated team members to simultaneously manipulate artifacts while seeing each other's gestures and facial expressions. Our system's flexible architecture maximizes hardware independence by supporting a diverse selection of input devices. I. INTRODUCTION Collaborative creative work is done best in co-located settings (12). People directly communicate with each other, see each other's gestures and facial expressions, and manipulate all involved artifacts. Sticky notes, whiteboards, walls, pens, all imaginable prototyping material and methods like role- play or storytelling may all be used when creative methods such as design thinking are applied (2). Furthermore, bringing together the insights of research and different perspectives of a diverse team is a key factor for successfully fueling innovation (30). In order to incorporate different cultural aspects as well, international teams are often favorable. But how can teams reasonably use the above-mentioned analog tools if members are geographically dispersed, and time zones separate them by several hours? Can suitable digital equipment replace these tools to support teams in their usual way of working, regardless of members' locations? A number of tools supporting remote collaboration already exists. In the last years, commercial products for remote collaboration improved tremendously to enable easy video conferencing with various levels of quality and costs. But satisfactory support for distributed creative working does not exist yet. Most tools only support standard desktop tasks and are cumbersome to use (11). Scientific research projects that study how people commu- nicate remotely and share working materials across distances exist for almost twenty years. But remote collaboration en- compasses a variety of different aspects, and these systems have focused on specific use cases. Some concentrate on the role of audio and video (with no whiteboard support) (8), (14), base location A base location B

Design Thinking is an approach for innovative problem solving. A typical characteristic of this approach involves multidisciplinary teams and the extensive use of tangible tools such as sticky notes, whiteboards and all kinds of prototyping materials. When team members try to collaborate from separate locations their traditional way of working becomes nearly impossible. A number of computer supported collaborative work systems exist, but there still lacks acceptable support for teams applying methods like Design Thinking. We have created an environment that allows these teams to work together efficiently across distances, without having to change their working modes. The Tele-Board prototype combines video conferencing with a synchronized whiteboard transparent overlay. This unique setup enables regionally separated team members to simultaneously manipulate artifacts while seeing each other s gestures and facial expressions. Our system s flexible architecture maximizes hardware independence by supporting a diverse selection of input devices. User feedback has confirmed that the Tele-Board system is a good basis to further enable collaborative creativity across distances while retaining the essential feeling of working together.

This paper presents a new method for publishing and consuming RDF data using object-oriented programming. We improve Object Triple Mapping (OTM) by separating (1) the transformation process between object-oriented data and RDF data from (2) explaining the transformation results using established Semantic Web vocabulary. To achieve this separation, we introduce a canonical vocabulary for object models. As a result, the Semantic Web expertise required to develop RDF-enabled applications is reduced.

After web 2.0 technologies experienced a phenomenal expansion and high acceptance among private users, considerations are now intensified to assess whether they can be equally applicable, beneficially employed and meaningfully implemented in an entrepreneurial context. The fast-paced rise of social software like weblogs or wikis and the resulting new form of communication via the Internet is however observed ambiguously in the corporate environment. This is why the particular choice of the platform or technology to be implemented in this field is strongly dependent on its future business case and field of deployment and should therefore be carefully considered beforehand, as this paper strongly suggests. KeywordsSocial Software-Corporate Blogging-SAP

The massive adoption of social media has provided new ways for individuals to express their opinions online. The blogosphere, an inherent part of this trend, contains a vast array of information about a variety of topics. It is thus a huge think tank that creates an enormous and ever-changing archive of open source intelligence. Modeling and mining this vast pool of data to extract, exploit and describe meaningful knowledge in order to leverage (content-related) structures and dynamics of emerging networks within the blogosphere is the higher-level aim of the research presented here. This paper focuses on this project's initial phase, in which the above-mentioned data of interest needs to be collected and made available offline for further analyses. Our proprietary development of a tailor-made feed-crawler meets exactly this need. The main concept, the techniques and the implementation details of the crawler thus form the main interest of this paper and furthermore provide the basis for future project phases.

Business often develop proprietary reputation systems for their community, with the side effect of locking users into that service if they wish to maintain their reputation (Bonawitz, Chandrasekhar, & Viana, 2004). Reputation is used in multi-agent models like e-commerce, and distributed computation and reasoning. Currently, virtual communities are using their own reputation values only without exchanging knowledge. Reputation transfer or portability is a controversial subject that is considered either not applicable or of high potentials. Trust is used to carry out decisions in case of uncertainty. In that sense it is used in peer-to-peer (P2P) networks to facilitate its interactions. In P2P networks, peers' willingness to share the content they have and forward the queries plays an important role during the content search process. Using reputation in P2P systems can be an incentive for peers to cooperate. The goal is to have dynamic social networks that work on acquiring, processing, establishing, analyzing, exchanging and evolving of knowledge. In this chapter, the authors are focusing on the use of one of the trust management approaches, namely the reputation-based approach. The connections of trust management to the classic IT security disciplines authorization, trust, and identity management will be laid out. With this background, a generic architecture for context-aware reputation systems, which can interact with identity-related services like identity providers and policy decision or enforcement points, is presented. More specialized architectures for different environments-business- or consumer-oriented-will be derived from the generic architecture.

This paper presents a new method for tracing the prove-nance of RDF data within object-oriented computations. The proposed approach eliminates the burden of manually keeping track of data prove-nance from software developers. Using object triple mapping, the source data items used for generating result data can be identified efficiently. The integration into an existing object triple mapping framework shows the feasibility of the approach. The work presented will help developing compliant RDF-enabled applications using object-oriented programming and may support the efforts getting the Web of data mainstream.

Up to now, developing software for the Semantic Web is much more complex than developing software for other data representation paradigms, such as relational databases. Software development for relational databases is dramatically simplified by so-called object-relational mappers. Due to the conceptual difference between relational databases and the Semantic Web, the design patterns for object-relational mapping cannot directly be used for linked data. In this paper we show how design patterns for object-relational mapping can be used to achieve the more complex object triple mapping, which will make developing Semantic Web-enabled software much easier.

This paper formalizes several independent approaches on how to develop Semantic Web applications using object-oriented pro-gramming languages and Object-Triple Mapping. Using such mapping, Semantic Web applications have been developed up to three times faster compared to traditional Semantic Web software engineering. Results show that at the same time, developer satisfaction has been significantly higher if they used object triple mapping. We present a formal notation of object triple mapping and results of an experimental evaluation clearly showing the benefits of such mapping. The work presented here may one day help to make Semantic Web technologies part of the majority of future applications.