Boris Glavic, Klaus R. Dittrich, Data Provenance: A Categorization of Existing Approaches, In: BTW '07: 12. GI-Fachtagung für Datenbanksysteme in Business, Technologie und Web, Verlagshaus Mainz, Aachen, March 2007. (Conference or Workshop Paper)
In many application areas like e-science and data-warehousing detailed
information about the origin of data is required. This kind of information is
often referred to as data provenance or data lineage. The provenance of a data
item includes information about the processes and source data items that lead
to its creation and current representation. The diversity of data
representation models and application domains has lead to a number of more or
less formal definitions of provenance. Most of them are limited to a special
application domain, data representation model or data processing facility. Not
surprisingly, the associated implementations are also restricted to some
application domain and depend on a special data model. In this paper we give a
survey of data provenance models and prototypes, present a general
categorization scheme for provenance models and use this categorization scheme
to study the properties of the existing approaches. This categorization enables
us to distinguish between different kinds of provenance information and could
lead to a better understanding of provenance in general. Besides the
categorization of provenance types, it is important to include the storage,
transformation and query requirements for the different kinds of provenance
information and application domains in our considerations. The analysis of
existing approaches will assist us in revealing open research problems in the
area of data provenance. |
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Claudio Jossen, Klaus R Dittrich, The process of metadata modelling in industrial data warehouse environments, In: BTW Workshops 2007, Verlagshaus Mainz, Aachen, 2007-03-01. (Conference or Workshop Paper published in Proceedings)
Modern application landscapes and especially huge enterprise applications, like data warehouses, used for decision support or other analyzing purposes get more and more complex. To manage, use and maintain these systems the need for metadata management has increased. In consequence of new tasks being identified by new groups of data warehouse users, the role of metadata management implies more than simply surf data schemas. It becomes necessary that metadata systems integrate different kinds of metadata and offer different views on the metadata as well. In this paper we discuss the process of identifying metadata model requirements, defining a new metadata model and finally implementing it in a metadata schema. The process is illustrated by a possible metadata model and schema, which were developed to meet the requirements of a complex data warehouse environment in Helsana Versicherungen AG, the largest Swiss insurance company. The paper describes the implementation of the metadata model based on the metadata standards Resource Description Framework (RDF) and RDF Schema (RDFS). The presented model and schema are just one possible solution and are not leading to a universal metadata model. The goal of this paper is to discuss the process of metadata modeling and to help metadata architects to develop their own metadata models and schemas. |
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Franziska Spring-Keller, Combining Personalisation and Adaptation in Game-Based Learning Systems, In: The Sixth IASTED International Conference on Web-Based Education. WBE 2007, Chamonix, France, March 2007. (Conference or Workshop Paper)
This paper deals with adaptation and personalisation of a learning environment in digital learning games for adults. There is a great demand for research that considers the learner-centred approach in learning games. Learners should be able to determine their personal learning goals with a learning environment that supports them according to their individual learner’s characteristics. The main focus of this paper lies in the design of an adaptive learning game that combines adaptation and personalisation. This system will be illustrated on the basis of the learning game “Virtual Team Collaborator”. It teaches social skills for group work and project management. Finally it is shown how to build up the individual learning paths that result from personalised choices. |
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Mike Rinderknecht, Jonas Ruesch, The Lagging Legs - Exploiting Body Dynamics to Steer a Quadrupedal Agent, In: Int. Conf. on Morphological Computation, March 2007. (Conference or Workshop Paper)
The goal of this work was to steer a quadrupedal agent
simply by changing the phase delay between its legs. Thus, we were able
to show that a quadrupedal agent could possibly reach every point on a
plane simply by exploiting its body dynamics. By exploiting body
dynamics the controller has to fulfill only the function of a
disturbance variable rather than exactly controlling the parameters of
an agent?s movement. |
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Christoph Kiefer, Abraham Bernstein, Hong Joo Lee, Mark Klein, Markus Stocker, Semantic Process Retrieval with iSPARQL, In: Proceedings of the 4th European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC '07), Springer, March 2007. (Conference or Workshop Paper)
The vision of semantic business processes is to enable the integration and inter-operability of business processes across organizational boundaries. Since different organizations model their processes differently, the discovery and retrieval of similar smantic business processes is necessary in order to foster inter-organi ational collaborations. This paper presents our approach of using iSPARQL � our imprecise query engine based on SPARQL � to query the OWL MIT Process Handbook � a large collection of over 5000 semantic business processes. We particularly show how easy it is to use iSPARQL to perform the presented process retrieval task. Furthermore, since choosing the best performing similarity strategy is a non-trivial, data-, and context-dependent task, we evaluate the performance of three simple and two human-engineered similarity strategies. In addition, we conduct machine learning experiments to learn similarity measures showing that complementary information contained in the different notions of similarity strategies provide a very high retrieval accuracy. Our preliminary results indicate that iSPARQL is indeed useful for extending the reach of queries and that it, therefore, is an enabler for inter- and intra-organizational collaborations. |
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Christoph Kiefer, Abraham Bernstein, Jonas Tappolet, Mining Software Repositories with iSPARQL and a Software Evolution Ontology, In: Proceedings of the 2007 International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories (MSR '07), IEEE Computer Society, March 2007. (Conference or Workshop Paper)
One of the most important decisions researchers face when analyzing the evolution of software systems is the choice of a proper data analysis/exchange format. Most existing formats have to be processed with special programs written specifically for that purpose and are not easily extendible. Most scientists, therefore, use their own database(s) requiring each of them to repeat the work of writing the import/export programs to their format. We present EvoOnt, a software repository data exchange format based on the Web Ontology Language (OWL). EvoOnt includes software, release, and bug-related information. Since OWL describes the semantics of the data, EvoOnt is (1) easily extendible, (2) comes with many existing tools, and (3) allows to derive assertions through its inherent Description Logic reasoning capabilities. The paper also shows iSPARQL – our SPARQL-based Semantic Web query engine containing similarity joins. Together with EvoOnt, iSPARQL can accomplish a sizable number of tasks sought in software repository mining projects, such as an assessment of the amount of change between versions or the detection of bad code smells. To illustrate the usefulness of EvoOnt (and iSPARQL), we perform a series of experiments with a real-world Java project. These show that a number of software analyses can be reduced to simple iSPARQL queries on an EvoOnt dataset. |
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Abraham Bernstein, Michael Daenzer, The NExT System: Towards True Dynamic Adaptions of Semantic Web Service Compositions (System Description), In: Proceedings of the 4th European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC '07), Springer, March 2007. (Conference or Workshop Paper)
Traditional process support systems typically offer a static composition of atomic tasks to more powerful services. In the real world, however, processes change over time: business needs are rapidly evolving thus changing the work itself and relevant information may be unknown until workflow execution run-time. Hence, the static approach does not sufficiently address the need for dynamism. Based on applications in the life science domain this paper puts forward five requirements for dynamic process support systems. These demand a focus on a tight user interaction in the whole process life cycle. The system and the user establish a continuous feedback loop resulting in a mixed-initiative approach requiring a partial execution and resumption feature to adapt a running process to changing needs. Here we present our prototype implementation NExT and discuss a preliminary validation based on a real-world scenario. |
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Christoph Kiefer, Abraham Bernstein, Markus Stocker, The Fundamentals of iSPARQL - A Virtual Triple Approach For Similarity-Based Semantic Web Tasks, In: Proceedings of the 6th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), Springer, March 2007. (Conference or Workshop Paper)
This research explores three SPARQL-based techniques to solve Semantic Web tasks that often require similarity measures, such as semantic data integration, ontology mapping, and Semantic Weg service matchmaking. Our aim is to see how far it is possible to integrate customized similarity functions (CSF) into SPARQL to achieve good results for these tasks. Our first approach exploits virtual triples calling property functions to establish virtual relations among resources under comparison; the second approach uses extension functions to filter out resources that do not meet the requested similarity criteria; finally, our third technique applies new solution modifiers to post-process a SPARQL solution sequence. The semantics of the three approaches are formally elaborated and discussed. We close the paper with a demonstration of the usefulness of our iSPARQL framework in the context of a data integration and an ontology mapping experiment. |
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Esther Kaufmann, Abraham Bernstein, How Useful are Natural Language Interfaces to the Semantic Web for Casual End-users?, In: 6th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2007), March 2007. (Conference or Workshop Paper)
Natural language interfaces offer end-users a familiar and convenient option for querying ontology-based knowledge bases. Several studies have shown that they can achieve high retrieval performance as well as domain independence. This paper focuses on usability and investigates if NLIs are useful from an end-user's point of view. To that end, we introduce four interfaces each allowing a different query language and present a usability study benchmarking these interfaces. The results of the study reveal a clear preference for full sentences as query language and confirm that NLIs are useful for querying Semantic Web data. |
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Jonas Tappolet, Mining Software Repositories - A Semantic Web Approach, University of Zurich, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology, 2007. (Master's Thesis)
Modern software development has become a complex task. Software systems grow larger and are densely interconnected to other systems making excessive use of large communication frameworks. To cope with this complexity, software developers and project managers need the assistance of tools which extract information about flaws in code as well as general information about the state of a project. In this thesis, we first introduce a data exchange format based on OWL/RDF, the Semantic Web’s format of choice today, able to store data and meta data from the source code, versioning system (i.e. CVS) and bug tracking system (i.e. Bugzilla). In a next step, we present a tool to retrieve the data from the online software repositories and to store it in OWL/RDF. This tool is implemented as a plug-in for the Eclipse IDE and is able to harvest data from projects managed by Eclipse. Finally, we evaluated our data format and tools by applying a set of software metric calculations, pattern detections and similarity measures by using iSPARQL and SimPack. The results of the conducted experiments are promising, and gave a first proof of our approach. |
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Michèle Baur, Applikationsentwicklung zur automatisierten Schreibtypbestimmung, University of Zurich, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology, 2007. (Master's Thesis)
Today writing is taught as a linear process. So every writer shout be able to write after a strict analytic concept. But this isn’t the right strategy for everybody. The theory of writing types talks about this difference between linear and non-linear writing. If you force a non-linear type into linear structures, this could be the reason of blocks in the writing process. For this diploma thesis an application named TypingType has been engineered. It should be able to categorize these types automatically. In the centre of this paper is the presentation of TypingType and its possibilities to analyse the writing process. Cause of the small amount of writing data the results of the program couldn’t be verified. So it is necessary to do further research work in this field. |
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Dany Benz, Lernplattform zur Messung von Lernerfolg und Flow, University of Zurich, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology, 2007. (Master's Thesis)
This paper describes the development of a learning platform for analysis of the relationship between learning flow and learning achievement. The platform includes two learning games which were developed on the basis of game and flow theories in order to induce flow in the users. This distinguishes them from classic learning games, which usually neglect important flow elements. An experiment carried out with these learning games observed an increase not only in the flow experience but also in learning achievement, thus indicating a relationship between flow and learning. For further research in this area this platform also makes it possible to have any number of experimental participants play online. The data is automatically collected on the platform itself, where it can be statistically analyzed with an integrated regression analysis. |
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Elias Diem, An Authentication Architecture for Network Access in Multi-Domain Mobile IPv6 Networks, University of Zurich, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology, 2007. (Master's Thesis)
The need for mobile network services such as Voice over IP (VoIP) increases steadily. Users will access these services from everywhere with their mobile devices. They will even access the services while moving. Mobile IPv6 was developed to bring mobility to the Internet. The access networks have to authenticate and authorize the users. This thesis develops architectures to integrate the mobility signaling with the authentication/authorization signaling in order to enhance handover performance. One of these architectures is implemented and evaluated. Depending on the network delay, it shows a better handover performance than if no integration of the mobility signaling with the authentication/authorization signaling is done. |
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Yves Haueter, Der Einfluss von Struktur als Informationsqualität bei Reiseinformationssystemen, University of Zurich, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology, 2007. (Master's Thesis)
This thesis discusses the information quality factor 'structure' in travel information systems. In the first part structure will be analysed within the field of general computer science. Then a specific framework for travel information systems developed at the Institute of Informatics will propose some hypotheses in which structure is compared to a wiki, an online community and a travel book. Building upon that a new concept is created in which views and scenarios are formed to a EPK-model which serves as an instrument to explore indicators for the structure. These indicators are then discussed, selected and analysed regarding an empirical measurement. For the empirical analysis which is captured on video the user has to answer 10 questions while structure will be measured. The indicators will then be evaluated and compared to the hypotheses proposed at the beginning. |
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Adrian Kuhn, Software-Qualitätssicherung für das PUA-Tool, University of Zurich, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology, 2007. (Master's Thesis)
The computer-aided tool to analyse a project environment (PUA) developed by the MIO group at the University of Zurich has a gap in possible quality assurance methods in the form of missing unit tests. Conceptually, this thesis will close the gap completely. Together with important aspect oriented concepts of unit tests, the physical and modular structure of the test framework is a fundamental part of the test concept and this thesis. The result is a test framework with the de facto standard JUnit, which is physically and modularly closely related to the productive code. This test framework is also partially implemented. Some functional bugs could already be detected by the test framework and they are documented in this thesis. The thesis provides a basis for further unit tests assuring the enduring quality of the project environment analysis tool. |
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Maik Lustenberger, Interface Design for BioLANCC, University of Zurich, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology, 2007. (Master's Thesis)
The usage of biometric data for authentication purposes increases. The possibility of reliable identification of humans by biometric characteristics and authentication for access control offers a simplification of key management functions. The BioLANCC software project is a solution for biometric access control management. It provides functionality for the administration of user groups and access schedules, and controls biometric devices used for access control over a TCP/IP network. The integration of BioLANCC in the application landscape of an enterprise is a necessity to enable the administration and realization of access control on enterprise levels. This thesis focuses on the integration of the existing BioLANCC application in an enterprise application landscape. It designs an API for the integration of external data sources like user data, and analyzes the possibilities of data exchange with other applications of the landscape. Furthermore, management flexibility is extended by enhancing distributed access to the BioLANCC application over a network. For this purpose, a Web application for BioLANCC based on Java EE is designed and further services for external applications are provided. |
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Marco Oetterli, Workflow-Implementation für Wissensmanagement-Methoden im Outsourcing, University of Zurich, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology, 2007. (Master's Thesis)
As a result of organisational and cultural distance, knowledge transfer in outsourcing relationship offers many challenges. To counter these challenges, prior work analyzed and optimized the approach to transfer knowledge in practice. Starting from this reference model this thesis inquires the benefit of process-orientation for the knowledge transfer. The creation of process models provides a basis for a workflow implementation to support the knowledge transfer. The prototype is then evaluated by experts using a walkthrough. The findings of this thesis show the meaningfulness and benefits of workflow support for unstructured processes like the knowledge transfer process. By means of this organizational anchorage it becomes measureable and manageable. Further, the coordination effort of the knowledge workers decreases and therefore the effort to transfer knowledge is lowered. The importance of the the success factor technology especially in outsourcing relationships, where a lot of knowledge needs to be transfered over wide distances, could be shown, thus it must be pursued in further work. |
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Martin Spörri, Administration of Metadata Models with Semantic Web Technologies, University of Zurich, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology, 2007. (Master's Thesis)
This thesis was written between September 2006 and March 2007 as a diploma thesis at the Database Technology Group, which is part of the department of informatics at the University of Zurich. The aim on one hand was to show what Semantic Web technologies are and how they can be used to administrate metadata. On the other hand the mission was to build a standalone software application that integrates into the existing metadata management system of Helsana Versicherungen AG and provides additional flexibility and functionality to the system. The thesis is divided into three parts: After a short introduction, the first part describes terms and technologies related to the Semantic Web and metadata management. The second part covers the planning, implementation and evaluation of the software application that was built, and the third part contains an overview of the work that was done as well as an outlook to possible further development. |
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Pascal Suter, Enhancing Communication with Context Awareness, University of Zurich, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology, 2007. (Master's Thesis)
Nowadays so many different means of communication are available that it is hard for us to find something in common with someone else to communicate with each other. Alltough the variety of communication channels and devices raises every day, our reachability seems to have stalled at a certain level. Why is that and what can we do, to increase the use of todays communication possibilities? In this thesis I will analyse our current communication situation and the problems related to it. I will try to find a solution to better deal with the variety and to make it easyer to choose the best communication device available for different situations. I will therefore make use of context information about the recipient in order to manage an incomming request the most pleasing way. A functional protoype will be implemented and tested afterwards. |
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Lennart Svensson, Decentralized Secure and Incentive-compatible Voting In P2P Networks, University of Zurich, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology, 2007. (Master's Thesis)
Voting in distributed systems is a thoroughly researched subject within the domain of computer science since more than two decades. Surprisingly, little attention has been paid to the subject of voting during he last years media hype of peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. This is in spite of the fact that voting could be used to implement decentralized decision making, which has many useful applications in self-organizing P2P systems. A voting mechanism for fully decentralized P2P networks needs to be scalable, secure, robust and incentive-compatible. The properties of existing voting mechanisms prevents them from being used in fully decentralized systems, as these mechanisms are either centralized or do not scale. This thesis proposes a fully decentralized voting protocol together with incentives and security mechanisms, for use in a fully decentralized P2P network. In order to fuse the concepts of peer-to-peer networks and voting, elements from several intersecting domains, such as for instance, network security and incentives for cooperation, were closely examined and exploited in this thesis. The design of the decentralized voting mechanism was implemented and integrated in a prototype P2P application. Preliminary experiments with the prototype show that the proposed scheme could be used for decentralized voting in a fully decentralized P2P network. |
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