The THESEUS research program, launched by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi), focuses on the development of intelligent information management technologies. THESEUS is envisioned to facilitate access to information, and to merge and connect information to establish the basis for the development of new Internet services.

The THESEUS research program assembled key companies with market power from all types of sectors to jointly develop the innovative products that will enable the knowledge society. There have been carried out six use cases to demonstrate applications based on the developements of the THESEUS Core Technology Cluster. In this article, we will give a short overview of selected results of each use case.

The Cubrik Project is an Integrated Project of the 7th Framework Programme that aims at contributing to the multimedia search domain by opening the architecture of multimedia search engines to the integration of open source and third party content annotation and query processing components, and by exploiting the contribution of humans and communities in all the phases of multimedia search, from content processing to query processing and relevance feedback processing. The CUBRIK presentation will showcase the architectural concept and scientific background of the project and demonstrate an initial scenario of human-enhanced content and query processing pipeline.

Uns steht heute eine Vielzahl an Informationen aus unterschiedlichsten Datenquellen zur Verfügung. Wir leben in einem Informations-Schlaraffenland (siehe Abb. 1) - Information umgibt uns immer und überall: Unsere Kontakte in Sozialen Netzwerken liefern uns wichtige Hinweise. Durch Push-Technologien wie RSS Feeds - „Änderungs-Nachrichtenticker“ von Webseiten - fliegen uns Informationen wie gebratene Tauben in den Mund. Webseiten unterschiedlichster Art halten uns bei unseren privaten und geschäftlichen Interessen auf dem Laufenden. Mobile Endgeräte erlauben es uns, überall auf Inhalte zuzugreifen und zu kommunizieren. So können wir - zumindest potenziell - immer und überall die für uns relevante Information konsumieren. Allerdings führt dies nicht selten zu einer Informations-Übersättigung. Eine strenge „Informations-Diät“ - das heißt der Verzicht auf aktuelle Information - ist dabei allerdings auch keine Alternative. Wir benötigen aktuelle Informationen, um unsere alltäglichen Arbeiten zu verrichten und um am gesellschaftlichen Leben teilzunehmen. Vielmehr geht es darum, genau die Informationen zu erhalten und zu verarbeiten, die auf die jeweiligen persönlichen Interessen abgestimmt sind. Dazu benötigen wir Ordnung in der digitalen Welt: Unterschiedlichste Quellen sollten so aufbereitet werden, dass wir genau die Information finden, die wir benötigen. Durch diese Ordnung werden Individuen wie auch Organisationen in die Lage versetzt, aus den verfügbaren Zutaten ein ausgewogenes „Informations-Menü“ zusammenzustellen.

Die Herausforderung, sich in der beständig zunehmenden Information zurechtzufinden, ist nicht neu. Durch verschiedene Applikationen insbesondere des Web 2.0 sind Lösungen entstanden, die einen Benutzer dabei unterstützen, einen Teil der für ihn relevanten Information zu verwalten und somit Wissen zu generieren. Allerdings bleiben die jeweiligen Informationen auf die jeweilige Applikation beschränkt. Mit Memex360 einem Ergebnis des Use Cases ORDO im Forschungsprogramm THESEUS wird eine integrative Schicht auf die Informationen implementiert, wobei die jeweiligen Werkzeuge weiter genutzt werden können. In dem Beitrag wird die Idee und Architektur von Memex360 vorgestellt.

Know.Right.Now is a technical documentation system that is used to dynamically publish personalized content. Depending on the user (i.e. according to his/her declared profile), the task that has to be performed and the product that the user is interested in, the system generates personalized content on-demand. The system is applied to the management of service literature at a large international company that publishes vast amounts of technical documents.

Our information society is being overflowed with digital data of various kinds. In order for the users to find relevant information, novel digital repositories should provide search mechanisms that are both content and context based, facilitating the formulation of queries and enabling search by example using 3D/2D objects, sketches, etc. At the same time the repositories should scale to the growing number of users. This paper presents the main achievements of the IST project VICTORY that aims at developing an innovative distributed digital repository introducing novel search, retrieval, and visualization capabilities to a desktop and mobile P2P networks.

The increasing number of hardware and software at Daimler-Benz personal car development in Sindelfingen combined with the constant number of help-desk operators demanded a help-desk system which goes beyond the classical trouble-ticket approach. In this application paper we give an overview of the situation at the CAD/CAM Help-Desk in Sindelfingen and the development of the case-based help-desk support tool HOMER. We describe our modeling approach and its influence on the system architecture as well as the different user roles and the help-desk tool itself. We conclude with the lessons learned during the course of this project and future prospects.

The usage of Wikis for the purpose of knowledge management within a business company is only of value if the stored information can be found easily. The fundamental characteristic of a Wiki, its easy and informal usage, results in large amounts of steadily changing, unstructured documents. The widely used full-text search often provides search results of insufficient accuracy. In this paper, we will present an approach likely to improve search quality, through the use of Semantic Web, Text Mining, and Case Based Reasoning (CBR) technologies. Search results are more precise and complete because, in contrast to full-text search, the proposed knowledge-based search operates on the semantic layer.

This paper focuses on integrating inductive inference and case-based reasoning. We study integration along two dimensions: Integration of case-based methods with methods based on general domain knowledge, and integration of problem solving and incremental learning from experience. In the Inreca system, we perform case-based reasoning as well as tdidt (Top-Down Induction of Decision Trees) classification by using the same data structure called the Inreca tree. We extract decision knowledge using a tdidt algorithm to improve both the similarity assessment by determining optimal weights, and the speed of the overall system by inductive learning. The integrated system we implemented evolves smoothly along application development time from a pure case-based reasoning approach, where each particular case is a piece of knowledge, to a more inductive approach where some subsets of the cases are generalised into abstract knowledge. Our proposed approach is driven by the needs of a concrete pre-commercial system and real diagnostic applications. We evaluate the system on a database of insurance risk for cars and an application involving forestry management in Ireland.

Experience Management (EM) as a sub-discipline of Knowledge Management (KM) deals with collecting, modeling, storing, reusing, evaluating, and maintaining experience knowledge, i.e., specific knowledge situated in a particular problem solving context.

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.

This paper describes why and how an ontology facilitates the sharing and trading of knowledge. It intoduces the underlying concept of a knowledge market place and how an ontology provides for the understanding of, and confidence and trust into knowledge products. Three case studies show real life examples of the approach. Additionally, the Information Ontology itself and the issues related to its maintenance are dealt with.