Contributions in Merlin

This thesis describes the mediating role of online trust on the behaviour of people on the Internet. Building on current literature on the topic, the definition of online trust is extended in order to account for cultural influences on trust. After laying out the theoretical foundations, the implementation of a browser extension, that could serve as an instrument to measure online trust, is given. In the end, a review of the used literature is provided and the limitations of the extension are discussed.

Customers rate the quality of financial advisory services in banks as unsatisfactory. To improve this situation a system, supporting the collaborative advisory approach, is developed. At the moment this system was not integrated into existing systems. In the course of this thesis a web-tool based upon the principles of User-centered Design and Scenario-Based development is developed. This tool supports preparing processes for advisory meetings. The development is done, the intermediary results are validated with various stakeholders and the results are integrated in the next step. The web-tool is an extension to the cooperative system and acts as an interface to existing systems.

The private banking and thus the financial advisory process is changing, the quality of the current advisory services is low and the diffusion of tablets like the iPad is progressed throughout the year. This provides the background and motivation to investigate the improvement of the financial advisory process with the usage of an iPad. A new conception was designed and implemented with low- and high-fidelity prototypes. Experimental evaluations show that we could maintain the improved transparency and high acceptance and satisfaction of the tabletop system. Furthermore, we increased the advisor's perceived ability to control the encounter. In return, the client's desire for more influence increased as well.

Legacy business applications using relational databases hinder the adoption of new data storage models. Improvements, for example brought by semantic web technologies, can not be used. Instead, backward compatibility has to be preserved what coerces into reusing the old data source or run several storage systems in parallel. A possible solution to that dilemma is using an RDB to RDF mapping. Therewith, a relational database can be accessed from the semantic web. Queries formulated in SPARQL will be translated to SQL. So the legacy database can be reused from a semantic context. OntoAccess is such an RDB to RDF mapping approach, while it is the only one which explicitly supports read and write access. In order to work, OntoAccess requires a mapping file with information about a database including tables, attributes and constraints. Creating such a mapping by hand is time-consuming and error-prone, hence it should be automated.

At the EMPA institute in St. Gallen they engineered a sensor box, which collects data during a ride of an electric powered motorcycle. The data are built up of GPS data and of measure data of the accumulator of the electric powered motorcycle. The ride of a motorcycle along a rectilinear driving surface is influenced by various physical forces: aerodynamic resistance, wheel resistance, slope resistance, acceleration resistance and driving force. With the aid of a simulation model, which is based on the System Dynamics approach, the physical forces and their causes, effects and feedbacks are showed and modeled. On the basis of this simulation model an Android application is developed. The application allows on the one hand to process the sensor box data and to compute the physical forces. On the other hand it allows to simulate a ride with different parameters and lets compare it with the real ride.

In information science, an ontology represents a shared vocabulary for a domain of interest with the purpose to describe entities of the domain and the relationships between these entities. One of the more common goals in developing ontologies, is to share a common understanding of the domain knowledge among people and software agents. An agent can process large amounts of data in native ontology syntax, whereas human beings need to have the data in a visualized form to be able to detect patterns, structures, and elements in the ontology. But most of todayís visualization tools have problems in scalability, cannot include domain specific knowledge, and confront the user with too much visualized details. The aim of this thesis is to create novel and powerful way for the user to analyse the data integrated into ontologies. Therefore a framework named OntoX has been developed that can read RDF/OWL files and present this data as an interactive information graph. In contrast to traditional tools that only rely on the user interface to interact with the graph, OntoX comes with its own implemented domain specific language. Through this simple language, a user can write ontology specific scripts that filter out elements, modify the design, or change the structure of the graph. Therefore the user gets a tool that assists him in analyzing the domain knowledge, and allows an individual configuration for every ontology.

This thesis describes the implementation of a prototype OGD for the city of Zurich. The main focus was the achievement of a data catalogue and several apps for example data visualization. At the beginning, an overview of the procedure and the used framework are introduced, followed by the explanation of the implementation and the resulted challenges. The thesis ends with a comparison of the prototype with similar projects of different countries and with another framework. It is shown that an OGD ZH is possible, but that there are still unsolved issues such as the realization of version control, multilingualism and the automatic generation and assignment of metadata.

This paper introduces and analyzes an evolutionary model of a financial marketwith a risk-free asset. Focus is on the study of local stability of the wealth dynamics through the application of recent results on the linearization and stability of random dynamical systems (Evstigneev et al. Proc Am Math Soc 139:1061–1072, 2011). Conditions are derived for the linearization of the model at an equilibrium state which ensure local convergence of sample paths to this equilibrium. The paper also shows that the concept of local stability is closely related to the notion of evolutionary stability. A locally evolutionarily stable investmentstrategy in the evolutionary model with a risk-free asset is derived, extending previousresearch. The method illustrated here is applicable for the analysis of manifold economic and financial dynamic models involving randomness.

Lately, we often hear the phrase: „One hundred percent risk for the supplier means zero percent for the client“. The clients want to carry zero risk in the general Terms & Conditions and thereby unlimited liability for the suppliers. In order to continue, expand and not to take any risks from other companies, Siemens Switzerland - Division of Mobility and Logistics (MOL) would like to improve their processes. As part of my bachelor thesis, I analyzed the MOL processes by focusing on traceability in three defined use cases for Order & Change Management in an SAP® environment and modeled these in BPMN. The goal was to find the vulnerabilities that traceability may negatively affect the process and suggest methods to improve them. My research findings show the following weaknesses: a) „No single process definition and Compliance“ b) „Redundancy of information in the same process“ c) „Information system with large media breaks“ and d) „No one to one traceability process of the product and its components, with special attention to purchased materials by foreign suppliers“. In conclusion, the new process definition eliminates the weaknesses that hinder the traceability process and this is also a prerequisite for the newly defined processes and methods of traceability (e.g.: to identify materials as a small total amount). These newly defined processes and methods relate ensures that the material is exactly where it is mounted and can be identified one to one (e.g.: screws). The improvement of today’s weak points is the condition for one to one traceability and with these newly defined processes and methods MOL will overcome the long-term challenge of the market and improve their competitive position.

Advances in computer aided design technologies and 3D scanning lead to geometric models of ever increasing complexity. Today's massive models not only exceed the capability for interactive rendering on high-end graphics hardware, they also exceed the amount of main memory available on a common PC. Out-of-Core algorithms are a common approach of keeping only a subset of data in main memory. In addition, parallel rendering can be used to distribute rendering tasks to a number of rendering nodes where each node only loads a subset of the complete model. Loading a subset of the model however is not easily adaptable with current standard polygonal mesh files. This thesis presents a new, flexible file format for massive meshes along with a set of reusable programming libraries and utilities to convert, modify, and visualize files in this format.