Contributions in Merlin

SummaryElectronic textiles are a vanguard of an emerging generation of smart products. They consist of small electronic devices that are seamlessly embedded into clothing and technical textiles. E-textiles provide enhanced functions in a variety of unobtrusive and convenient ways. Like many high-tech products, e-textiles may evolve to become a mass market in the future. In this case, large amounts of difficult-to-recycle products will be discarded. That can result in new waste problems.This article examines the possible end-of-life implications of textile-integrated electronic waste. As a basis for assessment, the innovation trends of e-textiles are reviewed, and an overview of their material composition is provided. Next, scenarios are developed to estimate the magnitude of future e-textile waste streams. On that base, established disposal and recycling routes for e-waste and old textiles are assessed in regard to their capabilities to process a blended feedstock of electronic and textile materials. The results suggest that recycling old e-textiles will be difficult because valuable materials are dispersed in large amounts of heterogeneous textile waste. Moreover, the electronic components can act as contaminants in the recycling of textile materials.We recommend scrutinizing the innovation trend of technological convergence from the life cycle perspective. Technology developers and product designers should implement waste preventative measures at the early phases in the development process of the emerging technology.

As has been discussed for decades, a reduction of the input of natural resources into industrial production and consumption by a factor of 4 to 10 is a necessary condition for Sustainable Development. This paper discusses the potential contribution of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to such a dematerialization of the industrial societies and introduces a conceptual framework which accounts for positive and negative impacts of ICT on physical flows. This framework addresses three levels: the ICT life cycle itself, life cycles of other products influenced by ICT applications, and patterns of production and consumption. The conclusion is that ICT will only contribute to Sustainable Development if this technology is recognized and used as an enabler of a deep structural change; a transition towards an economic system in which value-creation is mainly based on information processing while keeping the physical properties of material within some limits that ensure that it can be recycled. This structural change will include the transition from a material-property-transfer mode to a service-transfer mode of consumption in areas where this is technically feasible and beneficial in terms of resource productivity. In such a post-industrial society, which may also be called a sustainable information society, open technological standards will play a crucial role, since they allow for complexity reduction while keeping competition alive, thus minimizing the risk of unmastered complexity in new critical infrastructures.

This new edition of the seminar entitled ""Communication Systems IV""discusses a number of selected topics in the area of computer networks and communication systems. The first talk on ""Is the Cloud Green?"" addresses cloud computing and green ICT (Information and Communication Technology). Talk two on ""Economic and Technical Analysis of BotNets and Denial-of-Service Attacks"" gives an overview of denial of service attacks and with that the existence of big collections of compromized computers also known as BotNets. Talk three on ""Environmental Monitoring Using Sensor Networks"" discusses the environmental monitoring by means of sensors, describes the generic functioning of environmental sensor networks and points out the main advantages as well of challenges of this application. Talk four on ""DNS Security Extensions"" presents various types of DNS (Domain Name System) security flaws and it introduces DNSSEC as a new standard to address these flaws. Finally, talk ve on ""State of the Art of Service Component Architecture"" gives an overview of the Service Component Architecture as a recent specification to simplify and unify application development within the context of a SOA (Service-Oriented Archtitecture).

When performed on a model, a set of operations (e.g., queries or model transformations) rarely uses all the information present in the model. Unintended underuse of a model can indicate various problems: the model may contain more detail than necessary or the operations may be immature or erroneous. Analyzing the footprints of the operations - i.e., the part of a model actually used by an operation - is a simple technique to diagnose and analyze such problems. In this report, we present the implementation of static and dynamic footprinting approaches for operations written in Kermeta. We also present the models and model operations used for the comparison of these approaches.

This master thesis is about the creation of a semi-automatic data retrieval and visualization frame- work. The framework describes how semantic data can be retrieved from web services or SPARQL endpoints. By using Semantic Web technologies like RDF and OWL, the queried data is analyzed and depending on the type of data, a fitting visualization is displayed. An implementation of the framework is done by creating a web application in Java by using Google Web Toolkit. The application allows a user with knowledge of Semantic Web basics to query data sources from web services and allows him/her to upload new data sets. These can be visualized with little or no programming skills, which should make it easier for non-engineers to use semantic data. The application makes use of the cutting-edge tGraph framework to analyze and display temporal data. Special visualizations features provided in the web application are the display of information on a map, the use of temporal sliders to select time intervals and a tabular representation for larger data.

Online transaction platforms rely on the fair acting and behavior of the participants. It is a matter of two-sided markets, which needs both customers and suppliers to work. The transaction platform must provide the necessary trading conditions, that there is no abuse and does not cause migration of customers or suppliers. In the first part, this thesis investigates mechanisms that resist abuse provider strategies. For this purpose a game theory model of a transaction platform has been created. Measures (rating, trust, without protection) against abusive strategies were evaluated by using a simulation. The result of simulation shows that the application of the trust derived from the success of eliminating malicious behavior. On this basis, we have implemented a transaction platform TextKing which is already in use.

This paper examines how the use and the rating of communication media in virtual teams change over time. Familiarity of the teams is of great importance for analysing the change. If the familiarity of the team members can be built by communicating through media and what impact the familiarity has on the use and the rating of the different types of media will be discussed in this paper. The influence of the use or rating of the types of media by team familiarity can statistically not be proofed with the data of the EU innovation projects. However some results show a tendency to a connection between familiarity and communication. The survey shows that familiarity can be built in virtual teams with face-to-face communication, but also with the help of the omnipresent media email and telephone.

The SQL:2003 standard introduced window functions to enhance the analytical processing capabilities of SQL. The key concept of window functions is to sort the input relation and to compute the aggregate results during a scan of the sorted relation. For multi-dimensional OLAP queries with aggregation groups defined by a general θ condition an appropriate ordering does not exist, though, and hence expensive join-based solutions are required.In this paper we introduce θ-constrained multi-dimensional aggregation (θ-MDA), which supports multi-dimensional OLAP queries with aggregation groups defined by inequalities. θ-MDA is not based on an ordering of the data relation. Instead, the tuples that shall be considered for computing an aggregate value can be determined by a general θ condition. This facilitates the formulation of complex queries, such as multi-dimensional cumulative aggregates, which are difficult to express in SQL because no appropriate ordering exists. We present algebraic transformation rules that demonstrate how the θ-MDA interacts with other operators of a multi-set algebra. Various techniques for achieving an efficient evaluation of the θ-MDA are investigated, and we integrate them into concrete evaluation algorithms and provide cost formulas. An empirical evaluation with data from the TPC-H benchmark confirms the scalability of the θ-MDA operator and shows performance improvements of up to one order of magnitude over equivalent SQL implementations.Keywords: OLAP; SQL/OLAP; Window functions; Multi-dimensional aggregation