2018, Thönssen, Barbara, Witschel, Hans Friedrich, Rusinov, Oleg, Dornberger, Rolf

2016, Hinkelmann, Knut, Gerber, Aurona, Karagiannis, Dimitris, Thönssen, Barbara, van der Merwe, Alta, Woitsch, Robert

The paper deals with Next Generation Enterprise Information Systems in the context of Enterprise Engineering. The continuous alignment of business and IT in a rapidly changing environment is a grand challenge for today’s enterprises. The ability to react timeously to continuous and unexpected change is called agility and is an essential quality of the modern enterprise. Being agile has consequences for the engineering of enterprises and enterprise information systems. In this paper a new paradigm for next generation enterprise information systems is proposed, which shifts the development approach of model-driven engineering to continuous alignment of business and IT for the agile enterprise. It is based on a metamodelling approach, which supports both human-interpretable graphical enterprise architecture and machine-interpretable enterprise ontologies. Furthermore, next generation enterprise information systems are described, which embed modelling tools and algorithms for model analysis.

2013, Lutz, Jonas, Thönssen, Barbara, Witschel, Hans Friedrich

Information repositories, implemented as Enterprise Portals (EP) on the intranet, are increasingly popular in companies of all sizes. Enterprise Portals allow for structuring information in a way that resembles the organization of paper copies, i.e. simulating folders and registries and furthermore, provide simple routines for publishing and collaborating. Hence, in general, such kind of information management is not much different from paper management: electronic documents must be uploaded into the Enterprise Portal manually, filed into folders (which have to be created manually, too), tagged and related to other information objects if need be. With this approach information structuring remains subject to the individual user leading to the well-known problems of multiple filing, overlooking relevant information and incomprehensible Folder structure. The SEEK!sem project aims at improving such kind of information system by automatically identifying and recommending related information resources to be added to a folder. The recommendations are based on rules, exploiting content and context similarity of information resources. Rules can be created upfront, based on explicitly defined Relations between information objects. They can also be machine learned, i.e. the recommender exploits the existing linkage between documents, folders and other objects to learn “relatedness rules”. In either case, potential new connections are inferred by applying the rules in a reasoning step. Recommended new connections are ranked by the sum of the scores of all applied rules – the rule scores, again, can either be provided by experts or machinelearned. The applied rules can serve as an explanation of a recommendation, i.e. they can assist users in understanding why a particular connection is suggested.

2011, Hinkelmann, Knut, Riss, Uwe V., Magenheim, Johannes, Reinhardt, Wolfgang, Nelkner, Tobias, Hinkelmann, Knut, Thönssen, Barbara

The increasing agility of business requires an accelerated adaptation of organizations to continuously changing conditions. Individual and organizational learning are prominent means to achieve this. Hereby learning is always accompanied by the development of knowledge artifacts. For the entire of learning and artifact development the term knowledge maturing has been introduced recently, which focuses on these three manifestations of knowledge: cognifacts, sociofacts, and artifacts. In this paper we will focus on sociofacts as the subject-bound knowledge manifestation of social actions. Sociofacts are rooted in respective cognifacts play an independent role due to their binding to collective actions and subjects. These are particularly difficult to grasp but play a decisive role for the performance of organizations and the collaboration in there. The presented paper approaches the notion of sociofacts, discusses them on a theoretical level and establishes a first formal notation for sociofacts. We use the case of a merger between two companies to describe the advantages of sociofact analysis for such process. Some sociofact related problems during a merger are described and possible solutions are presented. We identify technical approaches for seizing sociofacts from tool-mediated social interaction and discuss open question for future research.

2016, Emmenegger, Sandro, Laurenzi, Emanuele, Thönssen, Barbara, Zhang Sprenger, Congyu, Hinkelmann, Knut, Witschel, Hans Friedrich

Support of workplace learning is increasingly important as change in every form determines today's working world in industry and public administrations alike. Adapt quickly to a new job, a new task or a new team is a major challenge that must be dealt with ever faster. Workplace learning differs significantly from school learning as it should be strictly aligned to business goals. In our approach we support workplace learning by providing recommendations of experts and learning resources in a context-sensitive and personalized manner. We utilize user s' workplace environment, we consider their learning preferences and zone of proximal development, and compare required and acquired competencies in order to issue the best suited recommendations. Our approach is part of the European funded project Learn PAd. Applied research method is Design Science Research. Evaluation is done in an iterative process. The recommender system introduced here is evaluated theoretically based on user requirements and practically in an early evaluation process conducted by the Learn PAd application partner.

2014, Thönssen, Barbara, Witschel, Hans Friedrich, Lutz, Jonas

Managing information based on hierarchical structures is prevailing, be it by storing documents physically in a file structure like MS explorer or virtually in topic trees as in many web applications. The problem is that the structure evolves over time, created individually and hence reflecting individual opinions of how information objects should be grouped. This leads to time consuming searches and error prone retrieval results since relevant documents might be stored elsewhere. Our approach aims at solving the problem by replacing or complementing the manually created navigation structures by automatically created ones. We consider existing approaches for clustering and labelling and focus on yet unrewarding aspects like having information objects in inner nodes (as it is common in folder hierarchies) and cognitively adequate labelling for textual and non-textual resources. Evaluation was done by knowledge experts based on a comparison of retrieval time for finding given documents in manually and automatic generated information structures and showed the advantage of automatically created topic trees.

2012-04-04T00:00:00Z, Thönssen, Barbara, Emmenegger, Sandro

Um Risiken in der Supply Chain früh zu entdecken, genügt es nicht, eigene ERP-Daten für Lieferanten auszuwerten. Vielmehr muss das gesamte Netzwerk betrachtet und Daten aus externen Quellen mit internen Daten verknüpft werden. Mit Hilfe semantischer Technologien können Daten integriert, automatisch analysiert und so Risiken früher identifiziert werden.

2016, Emmenegger, Sandro, Thönssen, Barbara, Hinkelmann, Knut, Witschel, Hans Friedrich, Ana, Fred, Aveiro, David

Enterprises and Public Administrations alike need to ensure that newly hired employees are able to learn the ropes fast. Employers also need to support continuous workplace learning. Work-place learning should be strongly related to business goals and thus, learning goals should direct-ly add to business goals. To measure achievement of both learning and business goals we pro-pose augmented Key Performance Indicators (KPI). In our research we applied model driven engineering. Hence we developed a model for a Learning Scorecard comprising of business and learning goals and their KPIs represented in an ontology. KPI performance values and scores are calculated with formal rules based on the SPARQL Inferencing Notation. Results are presented in a dashboard on an individual level as well as on a team/group level. Requirements, goals and KPIs as well as performance measurement were defined in close co-operation with Marche Region, business partner in Learn PAd.

2013-11, Hinkelmann, Knut, Maise, Michaela, Thönssen, Barbara, van der Merwe, Alta, Gerber, Aurona, de la Harpe, Andre

In this paper we show how semantic metadata – derived from the enterprise architecture description - can improve both the exploitation of information in the operative business and the continuous alignment of information systems with the business. ArchiMEO, a formal representation of the ArchiMate framework, was applied to model selected parts of a large Swiss company, including metadata of concrete information objects stored in various applications. The evaluation of our approach clearly gave evidence that linking an enterprise ontology with operational databases is beneficiary: it provides an integrated view and management of enterprise entities spread over various data stores, represented in different ways and levels of granularity. Furthermore, because of its inference capabilities, when used as metadata encoding scheme an enterprise ontology can provide context-sensitive access to relevant information.

2012-04-02T00:00:00Z, Hinkelmann, Knut, Thönssen, Barbara

Worauf sollte ein Unternehmen achten, wenn es ein DM-System einrichten will? Wichtig ist, dass nicht einfach alle bestehenden Dokumente verwaltet werden, sondern nur die geschäftsrelevanten. Mit einer Analyse der Geschäftsprozesse kann eine Firma den Aufwand für das Management überflüssiger Dokumente eliminieren und Kosten einsparen.