Roland Ernst Stiftung

The digital medium allows visitors, curators and art historians to gain new insights into their collections through data analysis and rich, interactive visualizations. Motivated by the rise of large-scale cultural heritage collections that have emerged on the Web, we argue that Formal Concept Analysis can be used to highlight the relationships between objects and their features within digital art collections and provide a means for visitors to explore these collections via interactive, narrated pathways. Our work presents four research projects that span 10 years from 2005 - 2015 – ImageSleuth, The Virtual Museum of the Pacific, A Place for Art and a scalability study of Formal Concept Analysis as applied to a data-set from the Brooklyn Museum. Our approach is based on the idea that much of the meaning that can be interpreted from museum collections lies – at least in part – in the way that objects are related to one another. Our work examines how Formal Concept Analysis can drive explorative, narrative-based visitor experiences and reveal new insights into cultural heritage collections.

Publish/subscribe (pub/sub) infrastructures running as a service on cloud environments offer simplicity and flexibility for composing distributed applications. Provisioning them appropriately is however challenging. The amount of stored subscriptions and incoming publications varies over time, and the computational cost depends on the nature of the applications and in particular on the filtering operation they require (e.g., content-based vs. topic-based, encrypted vs. non-encrypted filtering). The ability to elastically adapt the amount of resources required to sustain given throughput and delay requirements is key to achieving cost-effectiveness for a pub/sub service running in a cloud environment. In this paper, we present the design and evaluation of an elastic content-based pub/sub system: E-STREAMHUB. Specific contributions of this paper include: (1) a mechanism for dynamic scaling, both out and in, of stateful and stateless pub/sub operators, (2) a local and global elasticity policy enforcer maintaining high system utilization and stable end-to-end latencies, and (3) an evaluation using real-world tick workload from the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and encrypted content-based filtering.

Service Engineering comprises many different aspects of defining and creating a service. This especially applies to the Internet of Services (IoS) domain as it is understood by Texo, where services are not limited to a certain web service technology, abstraction level of functionality or application domain. In this context, service providers are increasingly forced to cooperate to strengthen their core competencies and to create partner networks to offer new services. In order to facilitate the collaboration process, business ecosystems are built which allow service providers to offer their own, as well as combined, electronic services with other providers over the Internet. In Texo, the Integrated Service Engineering methodology (ISE) has been developed which provides a comprehensive, interdisciplinary, and model-driven approach to electronic service development in business ecosystems. One major aim of ISE is to integrate business as well as technical stakeholders in the electronic service development process and support them with appropriate models, methods, and tools.

Continuous balancing of energy demand and supply is a fundamental prerequisite for the stability of energy grids and requires accurate forecasts of electricity consumption and production at any point in time. Today's Energy Data Management (EDM) systems already provide accurate predictions, but typically employ a very time-consuming and inflexible forecasting process. However, emerging trends such as intra-day trading and an increasing share of renewable energy sources need a higher forecasting efficiency. Additionally, the wide variety of applications in the energy domain pose different requirements with respect to runtime and accuracy and thus, require flexible control of the forecasting process. To solve this issue, we introduce our novel online forecasting process as part of our EDM system called pEDM. The online forecasting process rapidly provides forecasting results and iteratively refines them over time. Thus, we avoid long calculation times and allow applications to adapt the process to their needs. Our evaluation shows that our online forecasting process offers a very efficient and flexible way of providing forecasts to the requesting applications.

Nowadays, apps provide support for various simple tasks. They are easy to use and highly usable. However, future apps should support more complex workflows especially when trying to enter the professional business world. They need to provide higher reusability and composability in order to make them suitable for complex and alterable workflows that are common in industry. The concept of App Orchestration allows supporting complex tasks with aid of an ensemble of adapted and managed apps. Therefore, the apps raise several demands on the underlying information backend. This article describes these requirements and presents the Linked Data approach, which is a possible methodology for an integrated, semantically described information space for this purpose. It describes possible uses and benefits for the concept of App Orchestration and shows them in a use case of mobile maintenance. It further discusses the current status of the approach and provides future research challenges.

One of the major problems faced by the high-tech manufacturing industry is the need for automated and timely detection of anomalies which can lead to failures of the manufacturing equipment. Failures of the high-tech manufacturing equipment have a direct negative impact on the operating margin and consequently profit of the high-tech manufacturing industry. Automated and timely detection of anomalies is a difficult problem, the major challenge being the need to understand the interactions between large amount of machine components. Even very experienced system engineers are not aware of all interactions, especially if those need to be derived from high velocity sensor data. This, in turn, makes it impossible to recognize early warning signals and take action before failure happens.In this paper we present HUGO -- a system for real-time analysis of component interactions in high-tech manufacturing equipment. HUGO automatically discovers (based on the available sensor data) correlations between machine components and helps engineers analyze them in real-time so as to be able to detect deterioration of the manufacturing equipment conditions in a timely fashion.

Web application frameworks are a proven means to accelerate the development of interactive web applications. However, implementing collaborative real-time applications like Google Docs requires specific concurrency control services (i.e. document synchronization and conflict resolution) that are not included in prevalent general-purpose frameworks like jQuery or Knockout. Hence, developers have to get familiar with specific collaboration frameworks (e.g. ShareJS) which substantially increases the development effort. To ease the development of collaborative web applications, we propose a set of source code annotations representing a lightweight mechanism to introduce concurrency control services into mature web frameworks. Those annotations are interpreted at runtime by a dedicated collaboration engine to sync documents and resolve conflicts. We enhanced the general-purpose framework Knockout with a collaboration engine and conducted a developer study comparing our approach to a traditional concurrency control library. The evaluation results show that the effort to incorporate collaboration capabilities into a web application can be reduced by up to 40 percent using the annotation-based solution.

Product-related information can be found in various data sources and formats across the product lifecycle. Effectively exploiting this information requires the federation of these sources, the extraction of implicit information, and the efficient access to this comprehensive knowledge base. Existing solutions for product information management (PIM) are usually restricted to structured information, but most of the business-critical information resides in unstructured documents. We present a generic architecture for federating heterogeneous information from various sources, including the Internet of Things, and argue how this process benefits from using semantic representations. A reference implementation tailor-made to business users is explained and evaluated. We also discuss several issues we experienced that we believe to be valuable for researchers and implementers of semantic information systems, as well as the information retrieval community.

The analysis of modern production environments requires a clear and understandable uniform visualization of the information from all levels of the production. This visualization has to be on the one hand light weight to avoid cognitive overload of the users and on the other hand rich enough to provide information about all production information sources. To solve this issue we propose to use a unified component-based visualization where single items can be exchanged to fulfill the informational needs of the users from heterogeneous data sources.

The goal of the DEBS Grand Challenge series is to contribute to the Event Processing Grand Challenge, that serves as a common goal and mechanism for coordinating research focusing on event processing. DEBS Grand Challenge series provides a common ground and evaluation criteria for a competition aimed at both research and industrial event-based systems. The goal of the DEBS Grand Challenge participants is to implement a solution to a specific problem provided by the DEBS Grand Challenge organizers. In this paper we present a description of the DEBS 2012 Grand Challenge problem focusing on the high-tech manufacturing domain. Moreover we provide a set of both: (1) real-life data and (2) queries which can be used by the DEBS 2012 Grand Challenge participants as well as research community at large.