Thönssen, Barbara

Loading...
Profile Picture
Email Address
Birth Date
Project
Organizational Units
Job Title
Last Name
Thönssen
First Name
Barbara
Name
Thönssen, Barbara

Search results

Now showing 1 - 8 of 8
Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Publication

Workplace Learning - Providing Recommendations of Experts and Learning Resources in a Context-sensitive and Personalized Manner

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.

Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Publication

Connecting Enterprise Architecture and Information Objects Using an Enterprise Ontology

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.

Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Publication

A Collaborative Approach To Maturing Process-Related Knowledge

2010, Witschel, Hans Friedrich, Hu, Bo, Riss, Uwe V., Thönssen, Barbara, Hull, Richard, Mendling, Jan, Tai, Stefan

We introduce a new approach supporting knowledge workers in sharing process-related knowledge. It is based on the insight that - while o ering valuable context information - traditional business process modelling approaches are too rigid and in exible to capture the actual way processes are executed. Therefore, business process models are made agile and open for changes during execution. To achieve this, the strict distinction between build time modelling and run time execution are softened and process activities are represented to the users in a way that allows for individual adaptations. That can be done by attaching resources, commenting on an issue or adding problems and solutions to an activity or process. In addition activities can be delegated or new (sub-)activities can be added. Thus, the model can adapt to the reality of actual process executions and valuable resources and experiences are proactively presented to users in the right context. A double-staged Approach is chosen to apply the model in the real application scenario of a university.

Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Publication

KPIs 4 Workplace Learning

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.

Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Publication

Breaking free from your information prison - A recommender based on semantically enriched context descriptions

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.

Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Publication

What is Organizational Knowledge Maturing and how can it be assessed?

2009, Riss, Uwe, Witschel, Hans Friedrich, Brun, Roman, Thönssen, Barbara

We introduce the concept of organizational knowledge maturing based on the idea of developing knowledge assets. We explain the dimensions that have to beconsidered and introduce the Knowledge Maturing Dimension Framework to measure the maturity level. Finally we describe service classes as the building blocks of afuture organizational learning and maturing environment (OLME).

Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Publication

Where Did I(t) put it? A holistic solution to the automatic construction of topic trees for navigation

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.

Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Publication

Added Value of Sociofact Analysis for Business Agility

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.