Good hypertext writing style mandates that link texts clearly indicate the nature of the link target. While this guideline is routinely ignored in HTML, the lightweight markup languages used by wikis encourage or even force hypertext authors to use semantically appropriate link texts. This property of wiki hypertext makes it an ideal candidate for processing with latent semantic analysis, a factor analysis technique for finding latent transitive relations among naturallanguage documents. In this study, we design, implement, and test an LSA-based information retrieval system for wikis. Instead of a full-text index, our system indexes only link texts and document titles. Nevertheless, its precision exceeds that of a popular full-text search engine, and is comparable to that of PageRank-based systems such as Google.

We present a novel user interface in the form of a complementary virtual environment for managing personal document archives, i.e., for document filing and retrieval. Our implementation of a spatial medium for document interaction, exploratory search and active navigation plays to the strengths of human visual information processing and further stimulates it. Our system provides a high degree of immersion so that the user readily forgets the artificiality of our environment. Three well-integrated features support this immersion: first, we enable users to interact more naturally through gestures and postures (the system can be taught custom ones); second, we exploit 3D display technology; and third, we allow users to manage arrangements (manually edited structures, as well as computer-generated semantic structures). Our ongoing evaluation indicates that even non-expert users can efficiently work with the information in a document collection and that the process can actually be enjoyable.

The INKASS (Intelligent Knowledge Assets Sharing and Trading) knowledge exchange system couples case-based reasoning with ontologies to assist match-making between knowledge offers and knowledge demands in an interorganizational context. A tool suite lets system administrators maintain and improve the knowledge exchange.

In this paper, we discuss a new user interface, a complementary environment for the work with personal document archives, i.e. for document filing and retrieval. We introduce our implementation of a spatial medium for document interaction, explorative search and active navigation, which exploits and further stimulates the human strengths of visual information processing. Our system achieves a high degree of immersion of the user, so that he/she forgets the artificiality of his/her environment. This is done by means of a tripartite ensemble of allowing users to interact naturally with gestures and postures (as an option gestures and postures can be individually taught to the system by users), exploiting 3D technology, and supporting the user to maintain structures he/she discovers, as well as provide computer calculated semantic structures. Our ongoing evaluation shows that even non-expert users can efficiently work with the information in a document collection, and have fun.

In this paper, we will introduce BRITE, an Integrated Project sponsored by the European Union starting in 2006. The aim of BRITE is to exploit Semantic Web technologies in order to enable interoperation in a transnational scenario, namely processes between institutions that concert the registration of businesses in the European Union. While technically the scope of work of BRITE comprises research in process and knowledge modeling, novel ICT engineering/prototyping, design and piloting of intelligent new cross-border and cross-domain services, in this paper we will–according to the early state of the project– mainly concentrate on the BRITE scenario and the service cases envisioned.

An approach is presented to guide the benchmarking of invoice analysis systems, a specific, applied subclass of document analysis systems. The state of the art of benchmarking of document analysis systems is presented, based on the processing levels: Document Page Segmentation, Text Recognition, Document Classification, and Information Extraction. The restriction to invoices enables and requires a more purposeful, i.e. detailed, targetting of the benchmarking procedures (acquisition of ground truth data, system runs, comparison of data, condensation into meaningful numbers). Therefore the processing of invoices is dissected. The involved data structures are elicited and presented. These are provided, being the building blocks of the actual benchmarking of invoice analysis systems.

Having people from two sciences come together appears to be a difficult task, especially when one of the sciences has a tradition that can be counted in millennia and where the other one some decades ago simply did not exist. Todays talking about ontologies in informatics (computer science), for instance, can easily be misleading. The term is borrowed from philosophy where there is no such thing as a multitude of ontologies, there is only ontology as the subject of existence.

We explain our strategy towards a Semantic Desktop and our research and prototype. In this paper we complement these with the paradigm of paper-- scribbling, annotating, revising--, an information interface for knowledge work, which has been well-tried and elaborated over the centuries. Everybody is highly trained for it. The combination can instantly improve the conditions of knowledge work. By removing one more felt barrier, it has the potential to enhance a phenomenon called flow, providing users with efficiency and satisfaction at work. The implementation is built around a pen transmitting its movements and a state-of-the-art handwriting recognition.

Self-organized reuse of artifacts from software and system development, using the lightweight Wiki-Technology, promises a sustainable preservation and availability of business-critical information. However, due to the organic, sometimes chaotic growth of content inside a Wiki, additional support for structuring the knowledge and finding interrelated useful content is needed. The enhancement of Wiki content with ontologies – named semantic Wikis can solve these problems. The application of such semantic Wikis and the development of reasoning mechanisms for software engineering is subject of the project RISE (Reuse in Software Engineering).

Technological progress allows us to equip any mobile phone with new functionalities, such as storing personalized information about its owner and using the corresponding personal profile for enabling communication to persons whose mobile phones represent similar profiles. However, this raises very specific security issues, in particular relating to the use of Bluetooth technology. Herein we consider such scenarios and related problems in privacy and security matters. We analyze in which respect certain design approaches may fail or succeed at solving these problems. We concentrate on methods for designing the user-related part of the communication service appropriately in order to enhance confidentiality.

We explain our strategy towards a Semantic Desktop and our research and prototype. In this paper we complement these with the paradigm of pap er — scribbling, annotating, revising—, an information interface for knowledg e work, which has been well-tried and elaborated over the centuries. Everybody is highly trained for it. The combination can instantly improve the conditions of knowledge work. By removing one more felt barrier, it has the potential to enh ance a phenomenon called flow, providing users with efficiency and satisfaction a work. The implementation is built around a pen transmitting its movements and a stateof-the-art handwriting recognition.

The development of software is often accompanied by poor documentation of experiences, decisions, or architectural information. Reuse of experiences and knowledge, using the lightweight Wiki-Technology, promises a sustainable assurance and availability of business-critical information. In this paper we give an overview of the RISE research project (Reuse In Software Engineering), state the targeted research issues, and present our approach to tackle several of the identified problems.

Both disciplines – AI and SE – share the need to answer with structure (either called variables or data structures, or information or knowledge) when confronted with a real world scenario. This article discusses how SE Knowledge may be maintained and constantly cultivated among software engineers, adopting the well known Wiki concept based on approaches focussing ontologies. However, the main objective is not to destroy the desired lightweight character that Wikis stay for and have rather been successful for. In the long run it should result in a higher quality of software systems due to a better availiability and viability of SE-specific knowledge. 1 Creating systems for system creators The success of a system requires the art to really understand the problem it is supposed to solve. This understanding needs to be tranferred into a system with both, a considerable match of the system features with the necessities of the scenario in which it is used and with fatal flaws absent. System implementations are vulnerable to apparently minor mistakes, so that even close to perfection, artifacts can completely fail; a single minor mistake —a line of code, or an asset in the knowledge configuration— may destroy everything. [Bat02a] This does not only refer to a possible system malfunction. “Nonuse is a major reason for systems’ not achieving their designers’ objectives.” [SMC95] Consequently, SE and AI share the vital interest, we call reuse, i.e. to analyse the parameters of successful projects and to remember mistakes, in order not to commit them again — be it based on knowledge assets, expertise, code snippets, or anything else (cf. [JAD02,Kar95,MYA95]). Approaches to reuse are well known from knowledge management. In their details they feature a great bandwidth and —because also here the system must match the scenario— equally so do the approaches and systems to solve them. [AvE04,GDK04,JAD02,MA04] The problem approached in this paper is how to create a product plus respective methodical knowhow that can support teams of software engineers by increasing reuse. (Note, that all of the above certainly applies to this endeavor.) Like almost always in KM and SE, because the scenarios of reuse always comprise the people, i.e. individuals and their social system, the problems (of reuse) cannot be formally denoted (cf. “wicked problems” [RW73,Con05]). Note, that the problem at hand is even not one specific problem, but a whole cohort of problems. However, the partners in the consortium of the project RISE [pc05] want to use the product inhouse, but the industry partners, also really want to market it. They dispose of a Content Management System (large scale, with a strong case based retrieval (CBR) search [VWB98]) and a search engine (based on the vector space paradigm (VSP) [AHK03]), respectively, and want to combine their systems with Wikis. With one of the about 200 currently available Wiki systems [EG05] some of the 19200 software producing companies in Germany [SWR00] will probably be rather successful. It is further known, that there exist problems of reuse that cannot be successfully addressed with systems at all. A third party of companies do not have reuse problems or do not try to get better. For the fourth party a pure (“standard”) Wiki did or does not succeed, some additional intelligence is required — modules and/or measures. The cases where such modules can be based on CBR or VSP are clearly in target. To sum up, the solution sought is: a Wiki, extra modules, and a method. 2 Storage of “Knowledge” – the OMIS promises A broad spectrum of problems can be tackled with Organisational Memory Information Systems (OMIS) — systems that provide the service of a central storage of information to a group of people. We have seen very tame and successful projects, e.g. a company where the files of finished projects were frequently lost. Their knowledge problem was easily solved by simply providing them with a rather simple database for their files of finished projects. OMISs are one, if not the main technical means of knowledge management since years. [ABH98] Basically, the new paradigm of a Wiki is also an OMIS, however, features an aditional strong collaborative component. [EG05] A milestone of successfull uses of OMISes, published in the scientific literature [O’L98], are the strategy databases of large consulting firms, where three firms have been explicitly examined: Arthur Andersen’s Knowledge Space, Ernst & Youngs Leading Practices K-Base, and Price Waterhouse’s Knowledge View. 3000 to 5000 strategy documents respectively have been reported to be continuously maintained with great diligence. Every consultant returning from a project in the field is set free for up to one week, gets assistance by dedicated senior technial writers and processes and prepares his experience in order to enter it into the strategy database and keep it up to date. Consultants, starting with the very 4 Even more so, as frequently not the best solution is the most successful. first time in the field, continuously experience how much their personal success depends on this database, so that there is a high enough motivation to invest the considerable required effort, time, and money into its maintenance. [O’L98] We are aiming at those cases, where such a formal and disciplined procedure is not possible. 3 Towards group Knowledge by means of a Wiki 3.1 Wiki: Capturing and Maintaining Knowledge Wikis allow everybody to provide his knowledge easily, i.e. informally. The whole of the usergroup manages the process of polishing it. They are already in wide use, also for real business e.g. for project management. [EG05] The collaborativeness that Wikis add to the basic OMIS, promises to outperform the pure storage of information in an OMIS or the pure support of collaboration. In some cases Wikis have remarkable success. “T-Systems, SAP, Web.de, British Telecommunications, Walt Disney Corporation, Motorola und Yahoo. These companies use Wikis in their intranets. ”[Gmb05] The current manifesto of the German green party was collaboratively edited based on a Wiki. [Jel05] Detailed examinations of the parameters specificly of Wiki success and failure are underway. However, there are points that can be made now already. “Perceived enjoyment and perceived ease of use are stronger determinants of intentions to use [information systems] than perceived usefulness.”[vdH04] The joint editing supports that users intensely deal with the material of the others and that the final result is agreed or accepted. Where technology fails, a Wiki lets its users do what is required. E.g. it is taken care of improving, say a convoluted contribution. No knowledge assets are systematically excluded, contributions can freely adapt to necessities. Going beyond business information, e.g. with homepages of people, a company wiki could improve the efficiency of the communication (so that the business profits). For the controller point of view, it might be interesting to note, that the Wikis movement seems to be sustainable and further that, continuously, there are many new feature requests collected from users many of which are implemented. However, the RISE consortium, all pilot users of Wikis and observers of the Wiki landscape, have witnessed a number of Wiki projects fail completely. 5 The others can find interesting references in [JAD02]. 6 Wiki is not genuinely new, as there were web-based so-called content management systems like e.g. ZOPE before. Funnily, Rhizome, who do not label themselves as a Wiki, are considered a Wiki from others. Recently on the first and greatest event of the Wikipedia community, the Wikimania http://wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/Programme, it was mentioned to us in the discussion in the workshop “Wikipedia as a learning community” (http://en.wikibooks.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimania05/CL1), that Tim Berners Lee in his original implementation not of the Semantic Web, but of the World Wide Web, had designed the http-protocol so that people viewing pages, could also edit and save them. This is a remarkable fact. The Wiki was almost invented then already. When the content grows, it can become very hard to maintain a good structure. Without a good structure, information resources get lost in chaos, and people are frustrated by searching. [Ton05,Dav04] The latter sections treat approaches to transcend the usability of current Wikis to problems, where the maintenance of the content and structure of a Wiki are hardly possible today. In order, these are the promises of Semantic Wiki, Wikitology, and of some main methodical measures.

A domain of semantic analysis is presented: invoices. This domain has been successfully tackled by us with a practical system. The analysis of scenario and system yield, first, ideas how to decompose a scenario or domain and, second, concepts resulting from the decomposition. It is then shown how to further develop the concepts found, and how to enter into a system design and implementation. This paper does not present implementation details nor screenshots (they have been presented elsewhere), and it does not discuss how our system is configured in detail for a given application. Instead, it shows a higher level, a “greatest common divisor” of semantic analysis projects. All results, ideas and concepts, are potentially useful also in other scenarios.